Sea Lavender

What’s still green: Conifers, rose stems, yuccas, rockrose, coral bell, sea pink, sea lavender, snapdragon, Saint John’s wort, yellow evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy, chrysanthemum, some grasses

What’s gray or gray-green: Salt bush, winterfat, snow-in-summer, some pinks.

What’s red: Cholla, some pinks, small-leaved soapwort, coral and purple beardtongues, purple aster.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium, kalanchoë, Christmas cactus.

Animal sightings: Quail near cholla, smaller birds in peach and cherries; both were in scavenging bands rather than larger tribal groupings.

Weather: Snow midweek, rain Friday night, freeze and thaw continued on still frozen ground. 11:18 hours of daylight, if we’re lucky.

Weekly update: The freeze and thaw continues to take its toll. My sea lavenders kept their leaves until the heavy snows in December, when all but a few turned brown. When the snows disappeared and the cold remained the first of January, more died. This past week, all but a few hidden under other plants turned leathery with dessication. This is the third time since I planted these perennials in 2000 that some leaves have remained this long.

Chance has always played an important role in their lives. When I designed my garden, I simply said, I don’t have the instincts needed to plan an herbaceous border, so everything pink will go on the east side of the house, the blues on the west, and the gaudy reds, yellows and oranges in the center.

The size and shape of the beds followed the way a backhoe driver had carved, then leveled land from a hillside. On the east, there was only a foot between a retaining wall and the four feet clearance I wanted for the house. On the west a little more that two feet existed before the ground began sloping away.

Once I made my plans, such as they were, I spent several years compiling an impressive list of plants that wouldn’t grow here. Some things were obvious, like the failure of lupines which apparently won’t tolerate clay. Others, seemed more random: red morning glories, bachelor buttons, and larkspur grew to the east, but the more common blue varieties wouldn’t germinate in the west.

Eventually, some large catmints, a caryopteris, and Russian sage established themselves and I needed something to fill gaps between them that was more predictable than the ever migrating flax. Sea lavenders seemed perfect. The taproot could draw water from the narrow strip near the soaker hose, while the foot high branching flower heads could fill the dry space with tiny blue flowers in late summer.

Now, when I look at the surviving leaves, and the still green, grey or red leaved plants to the east, I wonder if my random acts haven’t revealed some hidden order in nature. Most of the plants that still have leaves fall into a few plant families: the Plumbaginaceae of the sea lavender and sea pinks; the Caryophyllaceae of snow-in-summer, pinks and soapworts; the Scrophulariaceae of the beardtongues and snapdragons, and the Saxifragaceae of the coral bells.

Ever since Darwin, scientists have been trying to detect patterns implied by such chance happenings as the survival of leaves on herbaceous plants in climates like mine. However, botanists have never fully agreed on what that taxonomy should be. In 1891, Otto Kuntze angered many of his German peers when he simply renamed many existing plants to clarify problems he found with Linnaeus’ original scheme. Sea lavender went from Statice latifolia to Limonium latifolium.

In 2003, the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group issued its own definitions based on recent findings in molecular biology, especially the characteristics of two chloroplast genes and another gene that coded ribosomes. They grouped Limoniums with the other plants surviving this winter on the east into the order Caryophyllales, which Mary Campagna and Stephen Downie had already discovered had chloroplast rpl16 genes that lacked the usual intron region associated with the development of RNA and protein.

Dolores Lledó’s team noted all the Caryophyllales were adapted to "extreme environments." Her group believes Limoniums developed about six million years ago when the Straits of Gibralter were opening and closing the Mediterranean and creating saline flats to the east. Sea lavenders, which now are associated with Bulgaria, Romania and parts of the former USSR at the eastern end of the sea, developed chalk glands which eliminated the salt they absorbed from the soil.

Ernst Benary tells growers the seeds still need low soluble salt levels in a slightly acid medium to germinate. However, the company suggests nurseries then grow the seedlings in sandy loam. I have the required loam that supports the plant in winter, but I wonder how a seedling sprouted this summer under a dripping spigot.

It wasn’t just the existence of water. When I had my well tested I discovered that the part of the aquifer which I tapped is still very salty from some ancient sea, with 78 units of sodium. Filters have reduced the count to 12, but salts no doubt collected in the area near my hoses before I acted in another random action that supports an unlikely plant within the constraints on unseen rules of natural causality in an extreme environment.

Notes:
Campagna, Mary L. and Stephen R. Downie. "The Intron in Chloroplast Gene rpl16 is Missing from the Flowering Plant Families Geraniaceae, Goodeniaceae, and Plumbagaceae," Illinois State Academy of Science Transactions 91:1-11:1998.

Ernst Benary Samenzucht GmbH. "R1680 - Limonium Latifolium, Sea Lavender, Statice," available on-line.

Kuntze, Otto Carl Ernst. Revisio Generum Plantarum, 1891.

Lledó, M. Dolores, Manuel B. Crespo, Michael F. Fay and Mark W. Chase "Molecular phylogenetics of Limonium and related genera (Plumbaginaceae): biogeographical and systematic implications," American Journal of Botany 92:1189-1198:2005.

Photograph: Sea lavender leaves, 24 February 2008.

Braford Pear

What’s still green: Conifers, rose stems, yuccas, coral bell, sea pink, Saint John’s wort, yellow evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy, some grasses

What’s gray or gray-green: Salt bush, winterfat, snow-in-summer, some pinks.

What’s red: Cholla, some pinks, small-leaved soapwort, coral and purple beardtongues, purple aster.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium, kalanchoë; Christmas cactus in bud.

Animal sightings: Sharp-clawed, four-toed paw prints in driveway mud.

Weather: First part of the week I drove out when it was 20 degrees and returned home after temperatures had risen to 50; the ground continued to harden at night, and soften during the day. Night temperatures warmed late in week when a predicted storm didn’t materialize. Some ice remains above bulbs in the garage drip line. Last snow 2/4/08; 10:59 hours of daylight.

Weekly update: In the past few weeks I’ve noticed greater color differences between the small twigs at the tops of trees and their trunks. The variations are most obvious with the Bradford pears growing at the post office, where smooth cinnamon limbs arise from vases of furrowed, gray bark.

Part of the difference is simply age. The outer edge of woody stems accumulates dead cells as the inner tissues continue to produce new layers. Younger brown stems simply haven’t acquired the patina of age.

Weather, like that of the past few weeks, introduces more changes when moisture gathers in crevices between branches, then freezes to pressure brittle limbs until one splits away. The trees build scar tissue necklaces around the breaks, which expands the gray bark up into the more golden branches.

The freeze-thaw cycle also affects the outer water-bearing cells of the woody stems. After enough expansion cycles, the inelastic bark shucks off, exposing the smoother layer behind the outer cork. On some trees at the post office, those exposed cells have whitened, while other tree trunks still have red inlays.

The damage is invisible in April when the trees are covered with five-petaled white flowers, and remains hidden under shiny-topped green leaves in summer. However, trees rarely reach their ultimate age of thirty because the constant splintering kills them.

The problems weren’t foreseen when the USDA released the sterile, fast-growing, pollution-tolerant, narrow, upright trees to nurseries in 1960. It no doubt spread as a replacement for elms that were being devastated in city and city. Some nurserymen later developed new cultivars with more open branches, but some of these went to seed and produced thornier problems.

The agriculture department originally imported Pyrus calleryana seed from China for Frank Reimer, who had discovered it was resistant to the fireblight bacteria that was then destroying Oregon orchards. It eventually became a popular rootstock for the edible fruit tree, Pyrus communis.

It wasn’t until the expansion of suburbs around Washington in the 1950's that department growers saw the callery pear’s potential for beautifying raw, barren streets. According to Theresa Culley and Nicole Hardiman, they selected one tree growing in Glenn Dale, Maryland, from seed collected by Reimer in 1919 near Neijing for cuttings to graft onto other callery pear stock.

When it was released, the USDA recommended that home buyers look for trees that nurseries had pruned and trained into open forms. However, some nurseries may have saved costs by avoiding that pruning, and others may have deliberately trained saplings to a tighter upright form. Still others may have done poor grafts which sprouted scion pears that could pollinate the Bradfords.

Meantime, landscape designers are abandoning the Bradford pear, because it becomes unsightly before it self-destructs and leaves clients unhappy with maintenance problems that lead to replacement costs. I have no idea if the post office will replace these trees when they die. My guess is one has already died and its space been left empty.

However, it is striking that someone here in the valley made a decision to plant white flowering trees on government-controlled land in the first place. The April-blooming Bradford pears are on the north side of the parking lot, while northern catalpas flower in June on the east end. A large bittersweet holds forth in May by the front door. The trees aren’t tall enough to provide summer shade, but right now the just opened sun burnishing red wood at 9am justifies the weekly trek into town to empty junk mail from my PO box.

Notes:
Culley, Theresa M. and Nicole A. Hardiman. "The Beginning of a New Invasive Plant: A History of the Ornamental Callery Pear in the United States," BioScience 57:956–964:2007.

USDA, Plant Science Research Division. Growing the Bradford Ornamental Pear, Home and Garden Bulletin 154, 1968, revised 1971.

Photograph: Bradford pear at post office, 16 February 2007.

Kalanchoë

What’s still green: Conifers, rose stems, yuccas, coral bell, sea pink, Saint John’s wort, yellow evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy, some grasses

What’s gray or gray-green: Salt bush, winterfat, snow-in-summer, some pinks.

What’s red: Cholla, some pinks, small-leaved soapwort, coral and purple beardtongues, purple aster.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium, kalanchoë; Christmas cactus in bud.

Animal sightings: Wherever it is the birds and rabbits are eating, it hasn’t been my yard this past week.

Weather: Snow Monday, very cold Wednesday morning, freeze and thaw ever since; 10:41 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Monday, several inches of snow fell on thawed ground. The rest of the week, my boots sank through snow and mud to the freeze line when I trudged in from the drive at night. When I left in the mornings, I negotiated ice-filled, foot-shaped craters. The only consolations for simultaneous thaw and snow was slowly lengthening days and a kalanchoë that’s back in bloom.

A friend brought me the houseplant at work in October 2004. I gave her a smile, gave it a baleful stare, and kept it watered in a florescent-lit office until it went out of bloom. Then, superstitious about living things, I brought the succulent home, and dumped it in with the aptenia on the covered porch. Suddenly, in February it was back in bloom.

The following year it started to bloom in mid-January and continued to produce four-petaled dark-fuschia-colored flowers until September. Last year, the Crassulaceae sent out loose umbrels of color from mid-February to mid-July. This year, it put out its first flowers on January 11.

Kalanchoës are so sensitive to long hours of darkness that growers routinely manipulate the light in their greenhouses to produce flowers for specific market dates. They also follow complex feeding regimens and use growth retardants to keep the flowering stems short. No doubt, perfectly mounded scarlet kalanchoës are being shipped at this very moment for Valentine’s day.

However, it’s not simply the absence of light that matters, but the nature of that light. When I was in grade school, physics was simple: the earth rotated every 24 hours, and orbited the sun every 365 days.

Rainbows represented the full spectrum of visible light and the sun continuously sent the full range of possibilities. However, we only received the full package at noon, which made the skies blue. At dawn and dusk, only the red side of the spectrum could travel the additional distance. The change of seasons was simply a magnification of this pattern: more blue in summer, less in winter.

Understanding physics and light got more complicated after that, but some researchers ignored waves and particles to posit the decline in blue light in winter was what depressed people. Long after I left school, Sterling Hendricks and Harry Borthwick discovered a protein, phytochrome, was the pigment that controlled how plants responded to the far red light between the extreme end of the rainbow and the more famous, invisible infrared light.

No doubt, mathematicians can run calculations that determine the exact amount of darkness required to generate the necessary amount of red light at 6,000' in this part of New Mexico to stimulate kalanchoës to convert from producing dark-green, scallop-edged leaves to reproduction. Botanists have already determined the ratio of far red to in-fared light needed to force a flower to open, close, or remain open despite its circadian rhythms.

On the Tsarantanana massif of northern Madagascar where Perrier de la Bathie found Kalanchoë blossfeldiana growing at 6,666' in 1924, they simply bloom when conditions are right. Mine apparently has reverted, as much as any cutting from a hybrid can revert. Its blooming schedule varies with the kind of November and December we have. Its stems get too long and reach for the light, a sure sign of white to far-red light; the leaves sometimes turn red, signifying too much light; it doesn’t put out as many flowers as it would if it got more blue light. But, it blooms on its own, where in other parts of the country experts tell people to place boxes over their pots to simulate long days or suggest they buy new plants.

So, however much I’ve been complaining about the dreariness of this winter, I have one plant, albeit one indoors, that acts like Pollyanna living in the best of all possible worlds.

Notes:
Engelmann, Wolfgang, Anders Johnsson, H. G. Karlsson, R. Kobler, M.-l. Schimmel. "Attenuation of the Petal Movement Rhythm in Kalanchoë with Light Pulses,"Physiologia Plantarum 43:68-76:1978.

Pérez, M., M.T. Lao, G. Scherer. "Influence of Different Lamps on the Growth and Development on the Short Day Plant Kalanchoe blossfeldiana," Acta Horticulturae 711 (2006).

Photograph: Kalanchoë growing on my east-facing, inside porch, 5 February 2008.

Arborvitae

What’s still green: Conifers, rose stems, yuccas, coral bell, sea pink, Saint John’s wort, yellow evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy, some grasses

What’s gray or gray-green: Salt bush, winterfat, snow-in-summer, some pinks.

What’s red: Cholla, some pinks, small-leaved soapwort, coral and purple beardtongues, purple aster.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, geranium, kalanchoë; new leaves at top of dried coral honeysuckle stems.

Animal sightings: Small birds, usually alone, in the garden or along the fence.

Weather: Rain Monday, snow Tuesday, cold temperatures and intermittent high winds since; 10:35 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: This has been one of those weeks that culls the weak and tries the strong. Monday’s rain fell on ground so soft my small car plowed 3" ruts in the drive. The next morning, northwest winds were too strong for me to close my front door from the outside. Since, night time temperatures have fallen to the low teens and the days have resoftened the drive. Even my neighbor’s arborvitaes have shriveled into themselves, turning their brownest faces to the elements.

In summer I look across the road at those evergreens with envy. The one near the back porch drip line has the pleated symmetry of party decorations that store flat, then open into honeycombed paper valentines or pumpkins. The younger two in front flourish with yuccas on the edge of a lawn he sodded in the center of his circular drive.

I’ve hesitated to plant my own, because someone in Texas told me they killed other plants, much like black walnuts. But I look at his vigorous shrubs and yuccas, and wonder what possible damage they could do here.

Anecdotes about plants’ bad habits are difficult to confirm. Where once writers followed standard etiquette that it was better to say nothing than say something critical, now publishers prefer subjects with product tie-ins. In either case, negative qualities were overlooked; if they couldn’t be ignored, plants were discretely dropped from texts. Information is left in the netherworld of rumor and the internet.

One reason for the confusion about arborvitae, commercially sold as Thuja occidentalis, is that it is commonly called white cedar. Red cedar, Juniperis virginiana, does suppress the germination of lettuce seeds in the standard test for allelopathy. Stipe and Bragg found it also inhibited or delayed the growth of finger coreropsis in unburned tall-grass prairies while Ferguson and Rathinsabathi found southern red cedar (Juniperis ciliciola) slowed red root pigweed and hairy crabgrass.

Neither cedar is actually a member of the cedar family; arborvitae is a cypress and the others are pines. The term cedar bark mulch can mean anything, and mulch is intended to suppress weeds. So the world of raw experience, unleavened by controlling theory or systematic experimentation, thrives.

Since I have no intention of growing lettuce - the local rabbits would be far more effective than any shrub in eliminating seedlings - it sounds safe enough to grow along a drive where only weeds and añil del muerto thrive.

However, now that I’ve learned a bit about white cedar, I’m surprised it grows here. Arborvitae’s native range is the Laurentian shield south through the Great Lakes where it thrives in swamps. There, it begins heavy seed production when it’s 30 years old and continues until it’s 75; it can easily live for another 300 years. If anything keeps it in control, it’s hungry white-tailed deer and bagworms.

Evidence from Alaska’s north slope suggests Thuja itself had evolved by the late Cretaceous, 65 to 97 million years ago, when limestone was forming. The genus still tolerates cold. In the wild, it can adapt to drought conditions, and its genetic structure has made it easy for nurserymen to create more than 100 cultivars attuned to different markets. However, the only thing I see I have that it likes is calcareous soil; my neighbor’s shrubs have certainly been highly offended by the recent cold spell.

Whether or not I experiment with arborvitae this spring depends on factors I can’t control: the amount of moisture left in the ground in the spring and the buying habits of companies that supply the local garden centers. One thing I can predict: I won’t be able to try southern red cedar mulch in the area where pigweed sprouts because the winds will blow it away within a week.

Notes:
Ferguson, James and Bala Rathinsabathi. "Utilizing the Weed Suppression Capacity of Selected Tree Species in Weed Control in Woody Ornamental Species," Florida Nursery, Growers and Landscape Association report, available on-line.

LePage, Ben A. "A New Species of Thuja (Cupressaceae) from the Late Cretaceous of Alaska: Implications of Being Evergreen in a Polar Environment," American Journal of Botany 90:167-174:2003.

Nesom, Guy. "Northern White Cedar," USDA plant guide, 2003, available on-line.

Stipe, Dan J. and Thomas B. Bragg. "Effect of Eastern Red Cedar on Seedling Establishment of Prairie Plants," North American Prairie Conference Proceedings 11:101-102:1988.

Photograph: Neighbor’s arborvitae, 2 February 2008, growing under a drip line where household debris collects.

Cheat Grass

What’s still green: Conifers, rose stems, yuccas, coral bell, sea pink, Saint John’s wort, yellow evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy, some grasses
What’s gray or gray-green: Salt bush, winterfat, snow-in-summer, some pinks.
What’s red: Cholla, some pinks, small-leaved soapwort, coral and purple beardtongues, purple aster.
What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, geranium, kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Bird heard chirping Thursday morning when storm preparing to come through.Weather: Ice remains in drip lines, including over the bulb bed by the garage; sprinkling of snow pellets Friday; 10:19 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Madeline Bassett pops up in Wodehouse novels to bedevil Bertie Wooster and declaim anthropomorphic images of nature. Everything she sees represents some aspect of the domestic life of the wee folk or God’s wonder-working ways.
Ironically, we use the terms we reserve for successful, if unscrupulous, businessmen for the plants we hate: aggressive, unfair competitive advantage, adaptable to deteriorating conditions, opportunistic. It’s as if plants, like women and Blacks, violate the natural order if they exhibit any of the competitive characteristics of men and large mammals.
Take cheat grass. Mine started growing late last fall, and now it’s green along the western faces of my fence and garage. Even though some is still buried in ice, it can resume growing as soon temperatures reach 37 degrees. People whose hobbies have been shaped by Hollywood’s world of perpetual sunshine find such as ability to thrive in winter abnormal.
Come spring, the annual will be the first green grass, almost dense enough to pass as a lawn. Then, in May, it turns red with seed and soon after dies. The drooping seeds attach themselves to socks and fall apart when touched, so every thin, brittle beard of every spikelet has to be removed individually. It becomes an eyesore just when city folks are ready to visit national parks.
Worse, Bromus tectorum, is not a native. It evolved in arid Asia before herbivores and has spread through overgrazed lands, especially in the Great Basin, as a mute reminder of our love for beef. Further, it spread when fire was used to eliminate unpalatable scrub. It also expands when grazing is stopped to restore the range because cattle and sheep controlled it by eating it before it sets seed.
While cheat grass didn’t create the situation, it’s blamed for perpetuating it. The stalks are curing just as fire season begins and its dead litter feeds wildfires that destroy other more desirable vegetation. In many drier areas, the native plants weren’t adapted to fire, and failed to recover, leaving cheat grass to hold the soil, at least against severe spring winds.
Some ecologists think it may be impossible to restore areas of the more arid intermountain west to their pristine pre-Columbian condition because too much damage has been done to the structure of the soil crust itself. In those areas, cheat grass may be an inescapable, permanent feature of the landscape.
None of this makes the grass welcome in my yard. I leave it along the drive where my tires keep it in check, and it prevents worse plants, like Russian thistle, from germinating. There I can enjoy it as it turns from bright green to a silvery haze of waving stalks to deep red patches, before dying tan and sere. But, I could just as easily enjoy it along the road.
When it gets near my garden, I pull it whenever I happen to be weeding the neighboring sunflowers and marigolds. It comes out with a ball of relatively short, fibrous, dirt-holding roots, that leave enough of a hole to cause problems if they had been pulled before the plant produced seed, when winds were high and nearby plants not yet established.
If I were a mule deer or bighorn sheep, I might think differently. I certainly would appreciate it right now, when its crude protein is about 20% and it’s all that’s green. But then, come April when the plants are ripening and the nutrients declining, I would have to roam elsewhere.
In this area, I wouldn’t have to go far, but in the more arid west where it’s the only plant that grows for acres, I might be reduced to a starvation diet of rain sopped stalks with 2% crude protein. Populations of black-tailed jack rabbits decline in those conditions, as do the numbers of birds that prey on them and other small mammals.
So why do people who eschew the sentimentalism of Madeline Bassett revert to anthropomorphic terms for cheat grass? When something lives on a different biological clock and uses our best management weapons against us, we have few words to describe it and nothing but metaphors to vent our frustration and helplessness.
Notes:
Wodehouse, P. G. For instance, Right Ho, Jeeves, 1934, and Jeeves and the Tie that Binds, 1971.
Zouhar, Kris. "Bromus tectorum," 2003, in United States Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System, available on-line.

Photograph: Cheat grass growing around remains of perennial four o’clock near water frozen in garage drip line; dead grasses are needle, cheat and three awn.

Cheddar Pinks

What’s still green: Conifers, rose stems, yuccas, coral bell, sea pink, Saint John’s wort, yellow evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy, some grasses.

What’s gray or gray-green: Salt bush, winterfat, snow-in-summer, pinks.

What’s red: Cholla, small-leaved soapwort, coral and purple beardtongues, purple aster.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, geranium, kalanchoë.

Animal sightings: Quail feeding yesterday afternoon.

Weather: Very cold the end of the week with ice still floating in the river yesterday morning; changes in daylight stretching to 10:14 hours today are noticeable during my daily commutes; last snow 1/06/08.

Weekly update: The cold returned, and this time there was no insulating snow.

Many surviving leaves have turned burgundy, including those of purple asters, beardtongues, small-leaf soapwort, and cheddar pinks. Most will survive this week, but the pinks are always problematical. In the best conditions, they thrive for a few years, then die in the first spell of harsh weather.

It’s more difficult than it should be to replenish them each year. Not all commercial varieties grow here, and those that do aren’t always offered. Seedlings need to be transplanted early, but last year Bath’s Pink didn’t appear in Santa Fe outlets until June. They died in the drought.

Dianthus gratianopolitanus isn’t doing much better in the wild. Both Poland and Germany list it as an endangered species. The population in the Jura Alps, which spreads from Switzerland into France, Luxembourg and the Saar valley, is declining. The only place it naturalized in England is the limestone cliffs of the Cheddar Gorge in Somerset near Bristol.

The species not only has limited soil preferences, but needs a long cold period before it blooms. Sonali Padhye’s team found they bloom four to five weeks after exposure to 68 degree temperatures, but that the grassy clumps only produce spotty single five-petaled fringed flowers unless those warm temperatures come after a transition time when the crown has been able to bulk up with narrow, gray-green leaves.

The only reason I bother with them is they are the only thing I’ve found that will grow in the exposed conditions on the east side of the house where the snow melts immediately and the winds whip through in spring.

Apparently, Dianthus emerged within the carnation family about 13 million years ago during the Miocene when grasses were spreading, the seas receding, and the Eurasian landmass forming. Harry Godwin found fossil relics of gratianopolitanus in deposits from the last glacier in England, and noted they still grew on limestone grasslands like those beyond my fence.

The particular variety currently offered that survives best here, Bath’s Pink, is from north Georgia where it adapted to granite soils, hot summers, and high humidity. Landscape designer Jane Bath gave pass-along plants she’d nurtured to Marc Richardson and Rick Berry to test before they released them to the trade in 1987 through their Georgia nursery, Goodness Grows.

Luckily, Bath’s Pink is still offered by one mail order house with an early discount deadline. So yesterday, before I went to the post office, I was out looking at motley leaves, wishing they were tea, and could tell me how many I should order, if the plants I receive will grow, and if there is any chance I’ll be able to buy more this spring. They wouldn't tell me how long, how severe this winter will be, or even how they were doing.

Notes:
Bath, Jane. "The Story of Bath's Pink," Georgia Perennial Plant Association Perennial Notes, winter 1994.

Godwin, Harry. The History of the British Flora, 1975, cited by Peter Poschold and Michael F.WallisDeVries,"Ths Historical and Socioeconomic Perspective of Calcareous Grasslands - Lessons from the Distant and Recent Past," Biological Conservation 104:361-376:2002.

Padhye, Sonali, Beth Fausey, Erik Runkle and Art Cameron. "Day Neutral Spring-Flowering Perennials," Greenhouse Grower, March 2006.

Photograph: Cheddar pink leaves, some burgundy, some still green, 19 January 2008.

Sprenger's Asparagus Fern

What’s still green: Conifers, rose stems, yuccas, coral bell, sea pink, Saint John’s wort, yellow evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy.

What’s gray or gray-green: Salt bush, winterfat, snow-in-summer, pinks.

What’s red: Cholla, small-leaved soapwort, coral beardtongue, purple aster.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, geranium, kalanchoë.

Animal sightings: Birds gathered in trees last Sunday before the storm moved through Monday.

Weather: Afternoons thawed the drive, and evenings refroze it. Some snow Monday, new moon Tuesday, 10:02 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: South Africa is the last place I ever expected to cultivate.

It isn’t just the politics. I always assumed that far southern hemisphere land, with its own floristic province which had evolved independently of the Eurasian landmass, produced plants too exotic to grow here.

But, this past week, when I looked out the windows of the enclosed porch towards sodden stalks detailed against wet cedar, the smell of damp earth infused the air where the space heater was drying the just watered aptenia of the Zulu and zonal geraniums descended from Cape Province parents.

Last summer I decided, once again, that the bowl of geraniums needed some kind of vine to fill the gaps between leaves on the fleshy stems. Vinca and Wandering Jew had failed. I doubted pothos or philodendron. I tried asparagus fern with little expectation that favorite of 1980's fern bars would survive my temperature extremes, intense sun, and occasional drought anymore than a lounge lizard could take daylight.

I’ve been surprised. The cluster of 8" stems in the original 2" pot have more than tripled in length, and now arch up through the geraniums to provide an unexpected veil of narrow leaves that soften its shapes and highlight its colors.

Mystified, I discovered my sprengeri variety of Asparagus densiflorus entered the nursery trade around 1890 through a bulb house in Naples with contacts in what had been the Boer colony of Natal. One of the Dammann owners, Mecklenburg born Carl Ludwig Sprenger was then experimenting with cannas and getting seeds from German speakers in the area.

I found my cousin of garden asparagus is as exotic as anything I might expect from that evolutionary island. Like the prickly pear fading in the cold out front, asparagus fern developed flat stems that photosynthesize sunlight into nutrients with less water loss than would occur through leaf pores. Those cladodes appear to be long narrow leaves, but the actual leaves are the tiny brown spines beneath the points where the modified branches attach to the round stems rising from the crown.

This member of the lily family has surface tubers which store water but do not participate in reproduction. Instead, tiny, six-petaled, white flowers produce dark red berries spread by birds, especially in parts of the world with climates similar to southern Africa.

This alien species from a stratified land passed into my life because another east African asparagus had trained my taste to expect some kind of filler in houseplant containers. When I was a child, florists still included tall stems of plumosa behind single roses or carnations in bud vases and often held them together with narrow satin ribbons.

Perhaps I can tell the remnants of my adolescent conscience this green protector of brash beauty no longer is South African, for the same reason I’m no longer part of the English who fought the Boer War and my neighbors are no longer the same Spanish who supported Franco. Asparagus fern seeds are sold in Europe, plants are produced in hothouses in Florida, and scientists are testing tissue propagation from small plant segments. We’ve all become domesticated together, and let our more feral traits atrophy.

Photograph: Zonal geranium through branches of asparagus fern looking out towards the cedar board fence, 12 January 2008.

Broom Snakeweed

What’s still green: Conifers, rose stems, yuccas, coral bell, sea pink, Saint John’s wort, yellow evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy.

What’s gray or gray-green: Salt bush, winterfat, snow-in-summer, pinks

What’s red: Cholla, small-leaved soapwort, coral beardtongue, purple aster.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, geranium

Animal sightings: Small birds out Saturday; pigeons threatening to settle on back porch.

Weather: Very cold until Friday when snow melted and drive softened near the gate; a little rain last night.

Weekly update: The cold has set in; whatever was green a few weeks ago is dead or crumpled by still melting snow. Down the road, arborvitaes are turning yellow and some pines are showing a brown epidermis. Maximilian sunflower stalks have been flattened by rain and snow; corn stalks are battered and half-down.

Fields lining the road are gray from bare winterfat, weathered Russian thistle, and dried grass stalks. Tarnished lumps of snakeweed provide the only variation on land whittled by cold winds from the north.

Unloved and unlovely, broom snakeweed symbolizes the final degeneration of the land. It arrives when the range is overgrazed or after fire, often waiting for the first wet season after a drought. It appeared in my yard after dry seasons killed grasses on trampled ranch land to the north. It lingers, unchallenged for years, before finally disappearing on its own.

You can’t remove it without encouraging it. Deep taproots are anchored by extensive lateral roots that cannot be dug out without planting new seeds. Lopping the top simply prunes woody stems that last only a year anyway. Fire kills mature plants, but seeds blow in to colonize newly fertilized land.

Occasionally, a horse will try to eat snakeweed in winter, but resinous glands on the short, skinny leaves protect it from all but the hungriest grazers. In spring, when new branches push up from the woody crown, sheep will nibble. But ranchers worry: saporins in the tender foliage can cause cows to abort, poison some who overeat.

The young, sticky stems grow one to two feet, with dense, dark-green leaves brightened by yellow undertones. Come late summer, the shrubs turn clear yellow from tiny, four-rayed composite flowers grouped into loose, terminal cymes. From a distance, green stems and tips of the tan bracts holding the flowers lend a chartreuse hue. Now those empty vessels provide the golden-moss color. When they fall away, dead branch stubs remain to scratch ankles of the unwary.

Gutierrezia sarofaroe is the kind of plant with enemies even more destructive than itself. It attracts grasshoppers, but I’ve never seen them stop to eat on their way to my garden. Supposedly, mealybugs and aphids will kill it, but they aren’t welcome where roses grow.

Humans usually try to find some justification for a dullard that smells like turpentine, but scientists have done no more than recognize it contains a number of volatile oils. No one seems to have found a use that’s been widely adapted, no matter how efficacious.

An Arroyo Seco médico used it for hemorrhoids, and other Spanish-speakers have tried it for douches and rheumatism. San Juan gave a tea to birthing women or bathed newly born infants, while Santa Clara tried it in sweat baths to cure colds and sore throats. More southern pueblos used it for emetic teas drunk before hunts.

It remains a stubborn, useless intruder that’s tolerated because it’s too much trouble to remove. It thrives on such neglect to leaven the winter landscape with some trace of color, even if it’s as muted and dreary as the season.
Notes:Curtin, L. S. M. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.

Dunmire, William M. and Gail D. Tierney. Wild Plants of the Pueblo Province, 1995.

Tirmenstein, D. "Gutierrezia sarothrae", 1999, in United States Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System, available on-line.

United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Range Plant Handbook, 1937, republished by Dover Publications, 1988.

Photograph: Gray grasses and winterfat with a band of bronzed snakeweed and scattered patches of snow, 1 January 2008.

Seed Orders

What’s still green above the snow: Conifers, Apache plume, rose stems, Japanese honeysuckle, columbine, rockrose, coral bell, snapdragon, bouncing Bess, blue flax, sweet pea, yuccas, Mount Atlas daisy.

What’s gray or gray-green: Salt bush, winterfat, buddleia, snow-in-summer, pinks.

What’s red: Cholla.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, geranium.

Animal sightings: Early in week, bird tracks in snow-covered beds, rabbit tracks in drive.

Weather: Cold Thursday killed many remaining green leaves; snowed around noon; since then, snow only melted on south side of house and from an exposed east facing bed.

Weekly update: I excuse my late fall laziness by claiming I let plants go to seed to give the best the chance to reproduce. Of course, I don’t rely on nature. So, the snow comes and goes, the birds leave tracks around abandoned stalks, and I spent the holiday reading this year’s batch of seed catalogs and ruminating on the earliest known American seed order, the one shipped in 1631 to Massachusetts Bay and reprinted by Ann Leighton.

When John Winthrop, Junior, bought seeds from a London grocer in July 1631, he, no doubt, had heard from his father, the governor, about the many deaths from cold and malnutrition the previous winter. He chose roots and leafy vegetables he knew would survive cold storage or drying and could be boiled in a single pot. His largest quantities were parsnips, carrots, cabbage, pumpkin, raddish, parsley, lettuce, skirret, and cauliflower.

Many of the other seeds he requested were herbs, like marjoram, basil, and chervil, that were added to the cauldron. Only a few were ornamental plants, perhaps the hollyhocks and stocks, and a very few, like monk’s hood, were exclusively medicinal.

Missing from his shopping list were the crop seeds, the grains and legumes, the wheat, rye, barley, oats, beans, and peas, the staples provided by the Massachusetts Bay Company. Daniel Slade says the proprietors also sent fruit stones; flax, hemp, woad and saffron seed for textiles; potatoes, and hop roots for brewing.

Winthrop’s selection seems commonplace enough. After all, the previous year Francis Higginson had told London that root crops, pumpkins, pot-herbs, and sweet herbs were doing well in Plymouth, founded ten years earlier. A generation later, John Josselyn found more than 40% of Winthrop’s species were commonly grown in Massachusetts.

What seems unusual about Winthrop’s receipt is that he bought ounce and half-ounce quantities of herbs. If he and his wife spent the first winter with his father, there were five adults and five children to feed. 80,000 thyme seeds, 40,000 savory, and 34,000 sorrel, the number offered today in an ounce, seems excessive for ten people, even granting Governor Winthrop was obliged to entertain.

I don’t know if Winthrop did the calculations I do when I plan a seed order, but I convert weight into number of seeds, and then into linear feet to make sure I don’t buy too much. As near as I can judge, adjusting for temporal differences in quality and cleanliness in seed, he would have needed at least five acres to grow all the seed he bought.

His father had more than enough land, certainly more than one of my immigrant ancestors whose three-acre town lot and six-acre crop land grant in Ipswich in 1637 would not have supported all Winthrop’s seed and also produced essential foodstuffs. In 1630, the governor had been granted a seventy-acre island now subsumed into Logan Airport, a 600-acre farm in what is now Medford, and a town lot.

However, like me, young Winthrop did need to consider how all those seeds were going to be planted, weeded, protected from birds, and harvested. The 25-year-old man had no intention of preparing five acres of virgin land himself before spring planting. His great-grandfather Adam, a guild leader in London, had purchased an estate when Henry VIII dissolved the abbey at Bury Saint Edmonds in 1552, his great-uncle John had claimed a plantation in Munster in 1595 when Elizabeth I opened the area to Protestants, and his younger brother Henry had gone to slave-owning Barbados in 1627. His father hired James Luxford a year later to manage the Ten Hills farm and used Indians on the island.

I suspect Winthrop thought he could make money from luxury seeds that were not supplied by the London company, for those were the ones he bought in superfluity. Perhaps he expected to sell some seeds in the spring, perhaps he expected to sell his surplus crop in summer. We know his father expected a profit from his farm because he later claimed Luxford sold the produce at below market prices.

I don’t know if my ancestor resented his dependence on seed and produce merchants, but other commoners rebelled against a profiteering nail importer in 1639. Even though I know I can enjoy the luxury of growing flowers, not vegetables, because entrepreneurs like Winthrop settled Massachusetts in the 1630's, the snow and the birds remind me life still depends on food, warmth, and good seed.

Notes:
Seed quantities per ounce from a number of sources, but the majority from Stokes Seeds, Growers Guide, 2008.

Avery, Clara A. The Averell-Averill-Avery Family, 1906; genealogy of one of my grandparent’s families gives details about William Averell from legal records.

Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed, 1989, discusses colonial diet and cooking techniques.

Higginson, Francis. A Short and True Description of New England, 1629.

Josselyn, John. New England’s Rarities Discovered in Birds, Beasts, Fishes, Serpents and Plants of That Country, 1672, reprinted by University of Michigan, University Library with 1865 notes by Edward Tuckerman.

Leighton, Ann, Early American Gardens, 1970.

Slade, Daniel Denison. “The Colonies of Massachusetts Bay,” in The Evolution of Horticulture in New England.

Photograph: Bird tracks around Maximilian sunflower stalks, 25 December 2007.

Single-seeded Juniper

What’s still green above the snow: Conifers, Apache plume, roses, hollyhock, columbine, rockrose, coral bell, snapdragon, bouncing Bess, blue flax, sweet pea, yuccas, Mount Atlas daisy.
What’s gray or gray-green: Salt bush, winterfat, buddleia, snow-in-summer, pinks.
What’s red: Cholla.
What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, geranium.
Animal sightings: Rabbit and bird tracks in snow Saturday morning.
Weather: Cold all week; snow Friday evening.
Weekly update: When I was a child trapped in the backseat on my parent’s weekly shopping expeditions, I would pretend I was in a covered wagon moving west and the fallow fields passing the side window were virgin prairie.
Around the same time, Angélico Chávez was driving along the Rio Grande to La Toma trying to recreate the experiences of Juan de Oñate and the Franciscans who came north with him in 1598. He thought the "hunched junipers and piñons" would remind them, not just of their Estremaduran homeland, but of the olive groves of the Holy land.
I was too young to know the Michigan land had changed several times since whites had intruded in the 1830's. He may not have known single-seeded junipers had been encroaching on grasslands since the suppression of wildfires in the 1880's, and were more common when he saw them than they had been during the entrada.
Ecological facts would not have mattered to either of us seeking an imaginative leap into the past through the only thing that remained, the landscape.
Those who only know the juniper from photographs of perfect specimens would not understand the associations made by a Franciscan scholar born in Wagon Mound in 1910. Our native trees are clusters of gray trunks buffeted by high winds into asymmetric stabiles that rarely reach their full 40' height.
Juniper is one of the first plants to come back after fire, and its deep taproot and supporting surface roots have adapted to drought. Even in the best conditions, it only grows about 6" every ten years, a foot every score. While this Pinaceae may bear fruit when it’s ten years old, its best years come when the gray-green evergreen reaches 50 and last another 150 years.
Juniperus monosperma is more than an indicator plant for vegetation at our elevation between 5,000' and 7,500'. For centuries, the dark purple berries were a staple of the pueblo diet, replaced only when other foods became available. Santa Clara used the wood for bows and digging sticks, bound the shredded bark with yucca for torches. Spanish speakers used sabino wood for ceiling lath.
Hu seeped into Santa Clara ritual life where Robbins and Harrington heard juniper branches were substituted for the preferred spruce in dances, while women purified themselves the third day after childbirth with bath water infused by the fleshy, flat leaves.
To the west, Zuñi women drank hot tea of toasted twigs and berries during labor. Spanish-speaking women in northern New Mexico sipped a half-cup each morning during the last month of their pregnancies brewed from the herringboned branch tips.
Now winter has set in, the only green I see from my window is the scrubby juniper where the quail run for shelter. When I walk out, all I see are green bumps on the ranges rippling away from the river and arroyo. Even though I know the trees have probably only grown since the ranch beyond ceased operations, there is still something elemental about the dark dervishes clinging to the earth like Franciscans called to matins by Chávez’s hero, Junípero Serra.Notes:Chávez, Angélico. My Penitente Land, 1974.Cobos, Rubén. A Dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish, 1983.Curtin, L. S. M. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.Dunmire, William M. and Gail D. Tierney. Wild Plants of the Pueblo Province, 1995Johnson, Kathleen A. "Juniperus monosperma", 2002, in United States Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System, available on-line.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.Stevenson, Martha Coxe. The Zuni Indians, 1904, reprinted by The Rio Grande Press, Inc., 1985.
Photograph: Juniper on the prairie, 22 December 2007.

Saint John's Wort

What’s green above the snow: Conifers, grasses, Apache plume, roses, Japanese honeysuckle, hollyhock, winecup, columbine, rockrose, coral bell, snapdragon, bouncing Bess, blue and yellow flaxes, sea pink, yellow and pink evening primroses, vinca,, sweet pea, yuccas, red hot poker, iris, Saint John’s wort, anthemis, Mount Atlas daisy, Mexican hat, purple aster.

What’s gray or gray-green: Salt bush, winterfat, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer, pinks.

What’s red: Cholla, soapwort.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, geranium.

Animal sightings: Bird tracks.

Weather: Snow Monday and Friday; ground frozen and heaving under gate.

Weekly update: It’s a week until the winter solstice, and the cold of winter has already set in. Almost everything has been buried by snow at least once this week, but one emblem of Midsummer’s eve, Saint John’s wort, poked through the icy crystals with tinges of red on the edges of its green, ovate leaves.

When I bought Hypericum perforatum in 2000, the store posted a warning it could become invasive. Since so few things grow in my garden, I thought it would be nice to have something that would fill in dry areas beyond the hoses, especially if it covered itself with bright five-petaled flowers.

Alas, my Helos cultivar has only bloomed three times, and then, rather than bouquets of stamens standing high above large, butter-yellow pads, the plants produced chartreuse tips. If any flowers were there, they were too insignificant to see.

However, as promised, it did spread.

I decided to move the plants from my front garden to an area where anything green was welcome, and discovered the rust-colored, serrated stems stood ready to protect their position. Whenever my arm brushed them, it started to itch. The likely cause is hypericin, a napthodianthrone that collects in the dark oil glands on the flowers and leaf margins.

That red chemical is the reason Saint John’s wort became commonplace after people with AIDS claimed it was a possible cure. Scientists have since found it is effective against T-cells and cancerous cells, but haven’t yet found a way to make it reliable enough to prescribe.

Maria Leach suggests this particular Hypericum species arrived in England with the crusaders who found it healed wounds in the middle east. In 1597, John Gerard still recommended using leaves, flowers and seeds soaked in olive oil to close cuts, a remedy repeated by Nicholas Culpepper in the 1650's.

Germans treat depression with hyperforin from the translucent leaf glands. This practice may be an extension of the traditional belief that it thwarts demons and counteracts spells, especially during the summer solstice when the spirits are active. The symptoms of the one may well be the same as the other, allowing for changes in language and the metaphors of emotional problems.

James Frazer believed the ancient Druid bonfires in England were the same as those in central Europe on Mid-Summer’s eve, only yellow flowers of mistletoe were collected to heal cuts and cure epilepsy. Saint Patrick is the one credited with substituting the name date of John the Baptist for the pagan rite.

Since I’m not ready to experiment with dosing myself with something that irritates my skin, I have no reason to leave the multi-branched interloper in my front garden. Its eradication is a constant struggle because the woody taproots have runners that break and regenerate.

In a way I’m lucky they don’t bloom. The hermaphroditic flowers are able to produce seed without being pollinated. Once buried, the seed can remain viable for ten years. In California they finally imported beetles from Australia to protect livestock from sickening when they ate it.

Since I’m not willing to combat one invasive species with another that might find other things to eat in my arid environment, I’m left with weeding, itching, and pondering the conflations of hyperforin with hypericin and Christmas mistletoe with snowbound Saint John’s wort.
Notes:Culpeper, Nicholas. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal and English Physician, 1650's, 1826 edition republished in 1981.

Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough, 1922.

Gerard, John. Gerard’s Herball 1597; reprinted as Leaves from Gerard’s Herball, 1969, from a 1929 edition by Marcus Woodward.

Leach, Maria. Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, revised 1972 edition.

Photograph: Transplanted Saint John’s wort in the snow, 14 December 2007.

Western Stickseed

What’s blooming: Sweet alyssum from seed.

What’s still green: Conifers, grasses, Apache plume, roses, Japanese honeysuckle, hollyhock, winecup, columbine, lamb’s quarter, rockrose, California poppy, coral bell, snapdragon, beardtongues, bouncing Bess, blue and yellow flaxes, sea pink, yellow and pink evening primroses, catmint, Rumanian sage, vinca, tansy mustard, sweet alyssum, western stickseed, white sweet clover, sweet pea, sea lavender, yuccas, red hot poker, iris, Saint John’s wort, snakeweed, coreopsis, anthemis, chrysanthemum, tansy, Mount Atlas daisy, Shasta daisy, perky Sue, Mexican hat, purple aster.

What’s gray or gray-green: Salt bush, winterfat, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer, pinks, fern-leaf yarrow, golden hairy aster.

What’s red: Cholla, soapwort, hartweigii.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, geranium.

Animal sightings: Usual red-sided birds and quail continue to feed.

Weather: Cold, clear nights early in the week iced over standing water along the road; more recently, clouds moved in to scatter droplets at sundown; rain yesterday; more rain and a little snow last night.

Weekly update: Whatever is a spring annual like western stickseed doing germinating in my driveway now, when other plants are either going dormant or dying from the cold? Normally, I see the basal rosettes emerge after March 20th and start flowering the second week of April.

It’s a question that puzzles botanists like Kathy Freas and Paul Kemp, who know desert annuals sprout when there’s enough moisture at the right temperature. What they wonder is how does a species survive when a cool temperature plant like Lappula occidentalis germinates just before a drought or severe cold that kills seedlings.

When they compared plants that germinate in the heat of summer when moisture is more reliable in the Chihuahuan desert with those like stickseed, they found the cool-season plants had developed genes that controlled dormancy, while summer plants had not.

Dormancy allows plants to build seed reserves which can sprout when conditions change dramatically. Stickseed is one of the first plants to arrive after a fire, stays long after the soil has been trampled by cattle.

For years, western stickseed pushed up thin stems with tiny, five-petaled, bluish-white flowers. Those stalks would unfurl, much like their forget-me-not cousins, to produce more color on top while hairy, green balls replaced spent blooms. The taproot could send up multiple, sparsely leaved columns, but usually they remained small, delicate plants that crept along the edges of garden beds.

Then, in 2004 the upper yard was covered with clumps where the ground had been disturbed in 2001 to bury a natural gas line. That area had been colonized by muhly ring grass until the drought of 2002-2003. The flowers were equally prolific in 2005, but since, the annuals have put out fewer and shorter racemes.

Perhaps the seed bank has been exhausted, although seeds are the one thing I know have been produced abundantly. The hard, odd-shaped dark seeds start to form in May, and attach themselves to my socks and pant legs in June. They remain a nuisance after the plants have dried into brittle stalks, enough to keep me out of the area where they’re growing and, coincidentally, protect the nearby soil.

It’s just been in the past few weeks, the very time that the vagrants have been growing in my drive, that the dead clumps have disappeared, probably broken off by the high winds and blown elsewhere to drop whatever barbed seeds remain.

The plants may have been shunted aside by snakeweed which also appeared in that area after the drought, and is not polite enough to quietly leave at the end of the season. Or, the tiny Lappula may not have liked the higher levels of rain and snow in the past few years.

It’s impossible to predict what will happens next year; the crop is too dependent of whatever combination of temperature and water exists in early spring. All I can do when I stop to open my gate is look for the white-haired volunteers to see how long they survive the coming cold.

Notes:
Freas, Kathy E. and Paul R. Kemp. “Some Relationships Between Environmental Reliability and Seed Dormancy in Desert Annual Plants,” The Journal of Ecology, 71:211-217:1983.

Photograph: Two western stickseed seedlings, 8 December 2007, with tansy mustard in back.

Apache Plume

What’s blooming: Sweet alyssum from seed.

What’s still green: Conifers, grasses, Apache plume, roses, Japanese honeysuckle, hollyhock, winecup, columbine, lamb’s quarter, rockrose, California poppy, coral bell, snapdragon, beardtongues, bouncing Bess, blue and yellow flaxes, sea pink, yellow and pink evening primroses, hartweigii, catmint, Rumanian sage, vinca, tansy mustard, sweet alyssum, white bristle stickseed, baptista, white sweet clover, sweet pea, sea lavender, yuccas, red hot poker, iris, Saint John’s wort, snakeweed, coreopsis, anthemis, chrysanthemum, tansy, Mount Atlas daisy, Shasta daisy, perky Sue, Mexican hat, purple aster, chocolate flower, black-eyed Susan.

What’s gray or gray-green: Salt bush, winterfat, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer, pinks, fern-leaf yarrow, golden hairy aster.

What’s red: Cholla, soapwort.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, geranium.

Animal sightings: More birds than usual on utility line Friday morning when the storm was in the air; flock of small birds in abandoned road bed Saturday morning, probably migrating; quail and red-sided birds in yard, no see-ums; brown goat down the road, horses in the village.

Weather: Cold early in week, snow lingered until rain Friday night; water in the wide arroyo yesterday morning; balmy in the afternoon.

Weekly update: Anyone who has both rented and owned a home knows there is a difference. In both cases, you enjoy the views and interior layout, but only in the one do you become intimately familiar with septic systems and furnaces.

A similar experiential difference exists between growing a plant and seeing it from a car. Take Apache plume. Anyone can enjoy the five-petaled single white flowers and pink, feathery seed heads in summer. But you only see the leaves and stems if you can get close to the loosely-branched shrub.

Many simply say the leaves are tiny or finely divided. In fact, they resemble small hands with narrow lobes that are shorter on the sides than in the middle. They unfurl much like fists, and often remain cupped rather than opening flat. They no only do not upholster the stems, but are neigh invisible from a distance.

When people can’t routinely see something, they tend to see what they expect. Shaw and Monsen observed new leaves emerge on this thornless member of the rose family in mid-April in Boise and expand in mid-May. Many who see the still green leaves in winter assume they are the same leaves.

In fact, my leaves begin to turn yellow in autumn after morning temperatures drop: last year it was early September, this year mid-October, a week after the first severely cold morning. In the past few week new leaves have been developing where the old ones are turning brown. With luck, they’ll remain on the plant.

New leaves do appear in spring, and this past year they displaced tan ones that had persisted through last year’s snows. It could take several years for me to fully comprehend the pattern, because our climate varies so much from year to year. Now I’ve had the shrubs for 18 months, all I know is what to look for.

The plant grows wild here, but it’s taken three tries to find commercial cuttings that would settle in my yard. Even though Apache plume’s a Chihuahuan desert shrub that has expanded its range, it’s still discriminating. When I’m driving, plants appear randomly along the road and across the river near San Ildefonso. In fact, they prefer the edges of arroyos and other run-offs and the ones I see daily are growing along a paved road that crosses a wide arroyo where their dense rhizomatous roots can reach water stored by both.

It’s cultural range is much smaller than its natural one: all the native usages mentioned by Moerman are from New Mexico or Arizona. Many tribes used the straight, slim branches for arrow shafts, but the Havasupai and Haulapai used roots and branches for cordage. Both the Santa Clara, who talked to men from the Smithsonian around 1910, and Spanish-speaking women, who talked with Curtin in the late 1940's in northern New Mexico, used poñil leaves for hair rinses.

Most pueblo people do not mention an association with witchcraft. The Kayenta Navajo of Arizona believed witches used the plant to induce insanity, but local Spanish-speakers mixed dried poñil plumes with other ingredients to counteract illness fomenting magic. Only the Sandia admit their brooms made from Apache plume branches are kept in the house for their "spiritual presence," while others, including the Santa Clara, simply say the brooms exist for outside use.

The difference between a cultural range and a biological one is like that between the renter and the owner, the grower and the admirer. On its own, Fallugia paradoxa prefers life under trees. In return, its branches shelter piñon seedlings and its roots harbor a cancer-fighting species of penicillium.

In the net of civilization, Apache plume’s reduced to an object of beauty by Idaho gardeners and to raw material by Arizona natives. Still, along the Rio Grande where the pueblos and Spanish settlers exchanged beliefs in witchcraft, it’s been absorbed into views of the world and the origin of things bad that are no more public than the tiny leaves alternating along pealing stems.

Notes:
Curtin, L. S. M. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.

Dunmire, William M. and Gail D. Tierney. Wild Plants of the Pueblo Province, 1995, includes Sandia.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, and on-line database includes Lucille J. Watahomigie, Hualapai Ethnobotany, 1982; Steven A. Weber and P. David Seaman, Havasupai Habitat, 1985; and Leland C. Wyman and Stuart K. Harris, The Ethnobotany of the Kayenta Navaho, 1951.

Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.

Shaw, Nancy L. and Stephen B. Monsen. "Phenology and Growth Habits of Nine Antelope Bitterbrush, Desert Bitterbrush, Stansbury Cliffrose, and Apache-plume Accessions," in Arthur R. Tiedemann and Kendall L.Johnson, Proceedings--Research and Management of Bitterbrush and Cliffrose in Western North America; 1982, cited by Jack McWilliams, "Fallugia paradoxa," 2000, in USDA Fire Effects Information System on-line database.

Simmons, Marc. Witchcraft in the Southwest: Spanish and Indian Supernaturalism on the Rio Grande, 1980.

Zhan J, E.M. K. Wijeratne, C. J. Seliga, J. Zhang, E. E. Pierson, L. S. Pierson III, H. D. Vanetten, and A. A. L. Gunatilaka. "A New Anthraquinone and Cytotoxic Curvularins of a Penicillium sp. from the Rhizosphere of Fallugia paradoxa of the Sonoran Desert," Journal of Antibiotics 57:341-344:2004.

Photograph: Apache plume leaves, after the snow, 29 November 2007.

Catalpa

What’s blooming: Sweet alyssum from seed, purple aster.

What still has leaves that shouldn’t: Spirea, forsythia, beauty bush, weigela; some local cottonwoods, catalpas, Russian olives, weeping willows..

What’s still green and visible above the snow: Conifers, grasses, Apache plume, roses, hollyhock, snapdragon, columbine, bouncing Bess, California poppy, rockrose, pink evening primrose, vinca, sea lavender, yuccas, red hot poker, Saint John’s wort.

What’s still gray-green: Salt bush.

What’s still gray: Buddleia, snow-in-summer, pinks, winterfat.

What’s turning red: Cholla, coral bell.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, geranium.

Animal sightings: Quail, small brown birds with light bellies and red sides; gopher active.

Weather: Snow late Thursday night, everything not buried in the morning was wearing a white crown; little melting since.

Weekly update: Nature’s a bit of an exotic dancer. She thrills you with her whirling colors and flourishes. Then, when you think you’ve seen everything, she drops her skirts and you discover what’s been hidden behind her leaves.

Down the road, unpicked apples expose their abstract placement. In the yard, I can see buds for next year’s lilacs and peaches. When I looked at the bare locust tree to see what was still green, I found Doctor Huey roses growing into the branches.

In town, catalpas bloom at slightly different times in June, but now I can find them all by their straight, parallel pods hanging like icicles frozen in the wind. Most lie among other trees and shrubs along property lines extending back from the highway in town where people built after the automobile made that a desirable location. Others dot the farm, village and orchard roads.

I just discovered the tree I planted in 2000 had bloomed this year, and I never noticed: the broad, heart-shaped leaves obscured the flowers, then shrouded three pods. I assumed my tree was still getting established. Joseph Breck warned gardeners in 1851 they didn’t bloom until they were ten to twelve feet tall. Mine, after years of drought and grasshoppers, is still only eight feet high.

I also wasn’t sure if the tree I ordered from an Ohio nursery was the same species that grew in village. The southern Catalpa bignoniodes was discovered in the southern colonies and spread north as an ornamental. Seeds were shipped to England in 1726. It’s still the most common variety in commerce.

The northern Catalpa speciosa was noticed by William Henry Harrison when he was territorial governor of Indiana territory between 1800 and 1812. However, botanists assumed it was simply an ecotype of the familiar southern tree with variations in habit attributable to differences in climate and soil. While scientists didn’t separate the two until later, Harrison took seeds back to Cincinnati where they spread through Ohio at the same time other settlers were bringing southern seeds in from the east.

Herbert Roberts suggests the easiest way to distinguish the two is by their bark: speciosa is furrowed, while bignoniodes has a scaly, pealing outer surface. The leaves of the one have a more pointed tip than the other. His photographs suggest the parallel, diagonal pods I see in town appear on northern trees while my crooked pods are found on southern ones.

I planted mine because I liked the white flowers that floated above new leaves. I’m not sure why others here grew a tree associated with the rich bottom lands of the Wabash and central Mississippi rivers. In Ohio, they were valued for fence posts, because the wood doesn’t rot in the ground.

In 1902, Roberts was suggesting the northern species be grown for rail ties in notoriously treeless Kansas. At that time, the Rio Grande Western was growing 60,000 saplings as an experiment in Provo, Utah. The year before, that rail line had merged with the Denver and Rio Grande which had reached our valley in 1880. It’s possible some railroad gandydancer brought northern seeds to town.

More likely, they were simply an ornamental grown to beautify the main road to Santa Fe after World War II when traffic picked up and people finally had some extra cash, as well as exposure to landscape design in other parts of the country where they’d been stationed. The use among other trees or shrubs is the one suggested by Breck a century before, perhaps because catalpas grow best in some shade.

Reliable as they may be when they’re converted into lumber, alluring as they may be in bloom, they are still a tease. Every year they grow in late summer. Every year their terminal buds are killed by cold. Every year, you must wait to see it they survived, for they are the last tree to leaf in spring. And then, this year, nature concealed my flowers and pods until she resumed her danse de la vie.

Notes:
Breck, Joseph. The Flower-Garden,1851, reprinted by OPUS Publications,1988.

Roberts, Herbert F. “The Hardy Catalpa”, Kansas State Agricultural College Bulletin 108:99-140, 146-213:1902.

Photograph: Catalpa pods and snow, 23 November 2007; dark, oval spot is a neighbor’s trash container at the road.

Russian Olive

What’s blooming: Coral bell, snapdragon and sweet alyssum from seed, chrysanthemum, purple aster.

Inside: Aptenia, geranium; coral honeysuckle putting out more new leaves.

Animal sightings: Small birds flit from peach to catalpa and beyond

Weather: Cold mornings with the smell of wood smoke, warm afternoons; last rain, 29 September.

Weekly update: Tis the fickle time of year when warm afternoons belie cold mornings and you can’t tell if a flower is real or a desicated shell of itself. Unsheddable dead leaves, most brown, stay on trees. Cherries and spirea remain shades of scarlet, but it’s impossible to know from a distance if they’re shriveled or whole.

Russian olives clasp dry, grey-green leaves, but I have one with a few narrow willow-type lances still turning yellow. Nearer the river, some trees looked untouched yesterday by last Thursday morning’s cold.

Elaeagnus angustifolia is an anomalous presence, a silvery fruit that’s not an olive, but an oleaster, an import from Europe that’s filled open gaps along the river. Mennonites who fled Prussian conscription for the Ukraine in 1789, spent years learning dryland farming and the value of windbreaks. When Russia threatened conscription in 1880, many migrated to the opening wheat lands of our plains and brought with them both the idea of a shelter belt and Russian olives. They arrived in South Dakota in 1874; in 1901, the state Agricultural Experiment Station issued a bulletin from Niels Hansen promoting the ornamental species.

Cuttings spread among Mormons in Arizona and Utah, and were growing in Mesilla Park in 1903 where New Mexico State was developing its new horticulture farm. Elmer Wooten and Paul Standley reported trees in several places in the state in 1915, but it didn’t naturalize along the middle Rio Grande until dams were completed at Elephant Butte in 1916 and Cochiti in 1975.

Some despise it as a reminder of what has been lost along the rivers. But, if home landscaping reveals anything about our views of an ideal natural world, then some here associate the trees with the river they knew as children. Two of the ten owners of ambitious homes built since I moved here in 1991 have planted Russian olives.

Their unconscious ideal may be a pink adobe set far back from the farm road sheltered by cottonwoods. While the back is now wild wood, the front is dominated by two large specimen Russian olives, one on each side of a bare yard so flat it has to have been leveled by flood irrigation. Grassland expanding out from the homestead to the road is all that remains from the agrarian past, and yesterday that green had retreated to the protection of the trees.

The new home owners differ from the traditional one because they no longer can afford to be open to strangers who use the main road. Their trees screen their houses from unseemly prying. But like the person who imposed formality of the rural land, these people didn’t act on some impulse in the local hardware. Russian olives can no longer be sold in the state. They went to some trouble to find and transplant thorny saplings to places where they could be seen from front windows.

Why? Perhaps because the airy placement of leaves with grey-scaled underbellies along dark curving boughs contrasts with the more somber cottonwoods in the drought of summer. Maybe, the fragrance from tiny yellow flowers in spring promises the return of life flowing from its nitrogen fixing roots. Even now, the spectral leaves sheltering green grass give hope that wintry cold may be delayed.

These images of the past, the future, and the river may be as illusionary as today’s freeze dried leaves, but they’re woven into life in a forever changing river valley.

Notes:
Garcia, Fabian. Comments on Mesilla Park, 1903, cited by Deborah M. Finch and Joseph A. Tainter, Ecology, Diversity and Sustainability of the Middle Rio Grande Basin, 1995.

Hansen, Niels Ebbesen. Ornamentals for South Dakota, 1901.

Tellman, Barbara. "Stowaways and Unwanted Guests: How Some Exotic Plants Reached the American Southwest," California Exotic Pest Plant Council, 1996 symposium, comment on Mormons available on-line.

Wooten, Elmer Otis and Paul Carpenter Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915.

Photograph: Russia olive on farm road with small cottonwood in front, 11 November 2007.

Winterfat

What’s blooming: Coral bell, snapdragon and sweet alyssum from seed, chrysanthemum, purple aster.

Inside: Aptenia, geranium; coral honeysuckle putting out new leaves.

Animal sightings: Birds in fruit trees.

Weather: Some very cold mornings; changes in sun angles more obvious; last rain, 29 September.

Weekly update: Winterfat looks the same all year. Most don’t actually notice it. Many, who see it along my drive, tell me it’s chamisa; a few say sagebrush. All that registers is a large, nondescript grey shrub with dark, pealing branches.

When I look more closely, I realize it changes with the seasons and the years. It begins as a small, erect sprig, with clusters of narrow grey leaves covered with white hairs. If it’s not yanked quickly, it puts down a deep tap root that splits into a Y a foot or so below the surface, firmly anchoring it against the winds. It also spreads more fibrous, shallower roots to collect surface moisture.

The little twig becomes several foot long branches rising from a short, yellowish trunk. Each year, new stalks are added, or the existing ones grow longer. My largest shrubs are about 7' wide with spreading 4' long branches, laying over dead wood. In areas where cattle or sheep graze in early winter, mature wood, filled with crude protein, disappears and the vigor of the bush increases from low buds on the trunk.

New leaves appear in spring that nudge off ones that survived the winter. Clusters of young, short, curved leaves are interspersed with inch-long, solitary lances. The rejected leaves join the remains of last year’s seeds in a self-maintained mulch beneath the lowest branches.

Flower spikes emerge in early summer where leaf clusters connect to the branches, an event invisible to all but the most acute observers. Like other members of the goosefoot family, this Chenopodium produces only the most essential parts: male and female organs anchored in separate cups of bracts, protected by tiny horns. No petals, no sepals, no scent.

Once the wind has moved the pollen down stem from the males to the females, across the shrub or to other plants, grey-green seeds form. Their tufts of white hairs transform bushes into piles of fluffy wands spreading above skeletal bases. The shrubs are at they’re most beautiful in early fall when sunlight filters through the seed heads.

Now the weather’s turned cold and the fine hairs that cover the leaves are turning pink. Many seed heads have disappeared, their seeds turned light brown. The branch tips are reverting to their lamb’s quarter form with narrow spikes curving out from clusters of clasping leaves.

Soon they will become forlorn heaps of brittle wood with tiny leaves no longer visible from afar. Beneath the wooly coverings, the leaves of summer were pale green, the twigs straw. In winter, everything looks like a Whistler study in black and grey.

On the ground, still attached seed hairs will collect moisture that will freezes to insulate the embryos from our wide ranging daily temperatures. Then, in the spring, when the air approaches 59 degrees, life will stir itself, new buds swell, and winterfat will rejuvinate itself.

Notes:
Booth, D. Terrance. Work with winterfat seeds described by Don Comis, "Winterfat Seeds Take Ice Stakes Through the Heart," Agricultural Research, 47:24:January 1999.

Carey, Jennifer H. "Krascheninnikovia lanata," 1995, in United States Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System, available on-line.

Photograph: Winterfat tip, 6 November 2007.

Autumn Leaves

What’s blooming in the area: Áñil del muerto, purple asters.

What’s blooming in my garden: Snapdragon, coral bell bud, petunia behind hollyhock leaves, sweet alyssum from seed, blanket flower, chrysanthemum.

Inside: Aptenia, geranium.

Animal sightings: Quail, ants.

Weather: Some very cold mornings; last rain, 29 September.

Weekly update: We’re having a genuine autumn this year, after several years with no serious frost until late November. After the cold a week ago Monday, trees that had stayed green suddenly were brown. Those that had some intimation of the coming desolation were more intensely yellow. A few had brown, yellow, and green patches.

Beneath the surface, abscisic acid is sealing the joints between branches and leaves, so that no open wounds remain when leaves finally drop. Meanwhile, the rate of photosynthesis is slowing as perennials enter winter dormancy, and the quantity of chlorophyll in leaves is decreasing. As the green fades, other leaf pigments become visible, including the yellow xanthophyll.

Xanthophyll had been known for years when Frederick Addicott’s team reported abscisic acid as a long sought growth inhibiting hormone in 1963. It begins as xanthoxin with 15 carbon, 22 hydrogen, and 3 oxygen atoms which have split from the 40 carbon, 56 hydrogen, and 4 oxygen atoms in a molecule of violaxanthin.

Xanthoxin is inherently unstably, and loses two hydrogen atoms to become abscisic acid aldehyde. When exposed to oxygen, that molecule converts into abscisic acid with a half life of about eight hours and four oxygen atoms. That in turn becomes phaseic acid with another oxygen atom, then dihydrophaseic acid with two more hydrogen atoms.

Xanthophyll sounded much simpler when Jöns Jakob Berzelius described the pigments in fall leaves in 1837. Scientists have since applied the term to any oxygen compound with 40 carbon and 56 hydrogen atoms.

The most important xanthophyll in leaves at dawn is violaxanthin. Instead of shucking off atoms and moving through the plant as abscisic acid, it stays in the leaf and loses an oxygen atom to become antheraxanthin. Later in the day, it loses another oxygen atom to become zeaxanthin, before reverting to its original state in the night.

Scientists want to know more than that zeaxanthin is created to protect the photosynthesis centers in leaves from increased solar energy levels in the day or that abscisic acid is a response to threats from low temperatures and drought. They want to know the nature of the bonds that connect those carbon atoms, the type of oxygen, the enzymes that transform each of the compounds, and the system of communication that triggers the creation of xanthoxin.

I don’t think about molecules, when I look through my windshield at the changing patterns of color formed by groupings of trees against the open fields, the sky, and each other. Still, it’s reassuring to know laboratory scientists remain who use the simple methods we were taught in high school chemistry to submit any scientific postulation, no matter how complex, to the old tests of dissolution, heating, sniffing, and spectrum analysis to reveal the beauty beneath senescent skin.
Notes:
Compounds in the abscisic acid chain
C40 H56 O4 - violaxanthin
C15 H22 O3 - xanthoxin
C15 H20 O3 - abscisic acid aldehyde
C15 H20 O4 - abscisic acid
C15 H20 O5 - phaseic acid
C15 H22 O5 - dihydrophaseic acid

Compounds in the violaxanthin chain
C40 H56 O4 - violaxanthin
C40 H56 O3 - antheraxanthin
C40 H56 O2 - zeaxanthin

Photograph: Yellow and green leaves on young cottonwood, 3 November 2007.