Chaste Tree

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, red hot poker, vinca, rock rose, sweet pea, sea pink, hollyhocks, pinks, snapdragon, golden spur columbine, some grasses. Someone down the road was pruning his apples yesterday.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer.
What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose, purple aster.
What’s blooming inside: Brazilian Christmas cactus, South African aptenia, rochea, and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Small birds in the cottonwood yesterday; sounds of fowl by the river earlier in the week.
Weather: A little rain Friday night, afternoons warmer.
Weekly update: Last summer’s remaindered temptations were two blue-flowered chaste trees. It wasn’t until I got the pots home that I remembered they need protection to survive zone 6 winters.
Rather than watch them die in the western blue border, I stuck the woody shrubs on the enclosed porch with some vague hope they might grow like trees in an atrium. Instead, their buds turned to dark berries without any evidence of an intervening stage, then the leaves turned brown. Since they’d shown no tolerance for missed waterings, I assumed they needed to be kept moist. To no avail, the leaves fell. I abandoned them in December. The only reason they’re still here is the snow, ice and mud have so disrupted use of the drive that only the most critical trash has been taken to the road.
Monday I happened to look at them when I was watering the geraniums and noticed new green leaves towards the top of each. Nothing obvious had changed: they’d had no water for more than a month, temperatures had ranged between 36 and 92 since I last reset the thermometer. Only the quality of the light streaming through the southeastern windows was different.
I thought I knew what deciduous meant. By the time I was in fourth grade, I’d been told the difference between northern evergreens and Michigan hardwoods that turned color after the first frosts of fall. However, the ability to shed and regrow leaves actually appeared in the warm Early Cretaceous when swamps were widespread and flowering plants just evolving. Daniel Axelrod believes when the climate began drying, the wetland plants that survived were those that sloughed unnecessary energy drains during droughts, like my chaste trees had done last summer when I forgot to water them.
After the unknown event that killed off the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous, temperatures rose an average 18 degrees and precipitation quadrupled for nearly a million years. Jack Wolfe found deciduous trees moved north, then became dominant towards the poles. At some latitude, the absence of winter light became more critical to sustaining photosynthesis, than temperature or water. Those plants that could respond to reduced day length by shedding leaves were the ones that survived, like my nursery-grown clones did last fall.
Vitex agnus-castus seeds have been found in Syria at Jerf el Ahmar in layers dated between 9800 and 9300 BC, where George Willcox’s group traced changes in cereal grains as people in the early villages learned the ways of food plants. It’s impossible to guess what those settlers discovered about chaste tree berries. We know now they contain chemicals that stimulate the pituitary gland to produce female hormones, and that long before they appeared in fifth century BC Greek medical texts, they were used as contraceptives.
In the second century BC, Nikainetos described the tree as "wreathing of the Carians," implying it had been brought from Anatolia to Samos where it was used to bind the cult statue of Hera to a tree during her ritual marriage to her brother Zeus. Several hundred years later, Ovid said Athenian wives participating in the Thesmophorian festival reenacting Demeter’s wait for her daughter, Persephone’s return from the underworld prepared themselves by abstention and strewing their beds with agnos branches. Later, Pausanias reported Hera was born under the lygos tree on Samos and the statue of Artemis at the temple to Orthia Artemis in Sparta was found in a basket woven from its flexible branches.
Whatever the symbolism of associating these goddesses of procreation, Hera, Demeter and Artemis, with a plant that prevents pregnancy, the use of lygos branches suggests that in these sanctuaries, near the same latitude as my enclosed porch, people may also have been struck by the wondrousness of a deciduous shrub that’s among the first to return after the solstice, the first sign of returning life and the promise of spring.
Notes: Española is at 36E00' north latitude, Jerf el Ahmar at 36E22', Sparta at 37E4', Samos at 37E45' and Athens is at 37E94'.Axelrod, Daniel I. "Origin of Deciduous and Evergreen Habits in Temperate Forests," Evolution 20:1-15:1966, abstract available on-line.O’Brien, Joan V. The Transformation of Hera: A Study of Ritual, Hero, and the Goddess in the Iliad, 1993, discusses Nikainetos.Ovid. Metamorphoses, 8 AD, cited by "Thesmophoria," Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911.Pausanius. Description of Greece, c.143-161 AD, cited by Ioannia N. Tsoulogiannia and Demetrios A. Spandidos, "Endocrinology in Ancient Sparta," Hormones 6:80-82:2007 and by O’Brien.Riddle, John M. Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, 1992.Willcox, George, Sandra Fornite, and Linda Herveux. "Early Holocene Cultivation Before Domestication in Northern Syria," Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 17:313-325:2008, available on-line.Wolfe, Jack A. "Late Cretaceous-Cenozoic History of Deciduousness and the Terminal Cretaceous Event," Paleobiology 13:215-226:1987, abstract available on-line._____ "Palaeobotanical Evidence for a Marked Temperature Increase Following the Cretaceous/Tertiary Boundary," Nature 343:153 - 156:11 January 1990, abstract available on-line.
Photograph: New chaste tree growth with unshed leaves and berries on enclosed porch, 24 January 2009.

Sea Pink

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, red hot poker, vinca, rock rose, sweet pea, sea pink, hollyhocks, pinks, bouncing Bess, snapdragon, golden spur columbine, Saint John’s wort, some grasses.

What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer.

What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose, purple aster.

What’s blooming inside: Christmas cactus, aptenia, rochea, bougainvillea, zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Rounded birds with grayish bellies and red sides were around the front porch last Sunday morning; water fowl were still noisy the first part of the week when I left for work.

Weather: Remains of snow continued to shrink. Each day the dry air pulled more moisture from thawed mud that couldn’t sink into the frozen sublayer, then returned some in morning frosts on purple asters and the debris from cut weeds. Last snow 1/10/09.

Weekly update: The mere fact I planted something called sea pink in arid New Mexico tells you my command of the English language is not what it should be.

Sea pink. As in a plant that grows by the ocean, not the color of some exotic type of salmon or the aquatic tint that appears only when corals are forming. No, campion of the sea.

My plants’ Armeria pseudarmeria ancestors cling to the rocks of Capo de Roca, the westernmost bulge of Europe that protects Lisbon from the fury of the Atlantic. The better known Armeria maritima stretches form the Bay of Biscayne to the salt marshes along the coasts of England, Ireland, and the northern islands.

The genus first appeared within the leadwort family during the Miocene in Spain when grassy savannas were colonizing the world. Towards the end of that epoch, some 5.9 million years ago, the Mediterranean outlets to the Atlantic closed and the internal sea began evaporating. As it dried, temperatures and salt levels increased in the basin.

Sea pinks deployed several survival strategies, including glands on their narrow lance-like leaves that expelled salt. Andrew Hanson’s team believes Armerias also developed new ammonia compounds within their cells to stabilize threatened proteins and membranes. One, choline-o-sulfate, removed the sulphur that accompanied salt; the other, beta-alanine betaine, replaced the more common glycine betaine which diverted choline to other purposes.

When temperatures fell with the ensuing glaciers, Armerias ceased adapting. Species like maritima simply withdrew to the estuaries and Scottish mountains when forests returned. Farther south, beyond the direct reach of ice, Belén Gutiérrez Larena’s group found they drifted up and down the mountains of southeastern Spain. Splendens, filicaulis nevadensis and villosa bernisii flourish at different altitudes today on the Sierra Nevada massif.

Sea pinks transcended the shady cold in spite of themselves because nature had provided them with two different forms of female stigmas, one with rounded bumps, the other with hairy nipples. Each produces male pollen that can only fertilize the other. When one species’ peregrinations brought it into contact with another, they were able to mate, like pseudarmeria and welwitschii on the periphery of the Estoril coast or the parents of filicaulis nevadensis.

Such openness to outcrossing not only produced the natural hybrids of Iberia, but the garden varieties of giant thrift already common in 1874 when The Garden magazine warned readers if they planted Armeria varieties too near one another, they would indiscriminately fraternize, and only the rare white flowers on the globular heads would remain true. Even then, the Portuguese perennial was variously called formosa, pseudo-armeria and cephalotes and sometimes attributed to southern Europe and northern Africa.

Who knows the origin of the Joysticks I bought in 2005, grown from seed released by Kieft in 1999. Perhaps the Dutch breeders sent collectors to Portugal, perhaps they simply built on existing inventories. Javier Fuertes Aguilar found the source wouldn’t have affected the botanic ascription anyway When he and his partners tested the DNA of several Spanish species, they found the Armerias had hybridized so often individual endemic examples fit no predictable genetic pattern that a taxonomist could associate with a Linnaean label.

Perhaps I’m lucky I spaced the name. Joysticks have enough Messinian germplasm to withstand summer droughts in the rio arriba, unfazed by saline well water, and perhaps something from a more northern species as well to remain green this winter. Few would buy them if they were called Dead Sea pinks, but perhaps that would have warned the linguistically challenged.

Notes:
Aguilar, Javier Fuertes, Josep Antoni Rosselló, and Gonazlo Nieto Feliner. "Molecular Evidence for the Compilospecies Model of Reticulate Evolution in Armeria (Plumbaginaceae)," Systemic Biology 48:735-754:1999.

Gutiérrez Larena, Belén, Javier Fuertes Aguilar, and Gonzalo Nieto Feliner. "Glacial-induced Altitudinal Migrations in Armeria (Plumbaginaceae) Inferred from Patterns of Chloroplast DNA Haplotype Sharing," Molecular Ecology 11:1965-1974:2002.

Hanson, Andrew D., Bala Rathinasabapathi, Jean Rivoal, Michael Burnet, Michael O. Dillon, and Douglas A. Gage. "Osmoprotective Compounds in the Plumbaginaceae: A Natural Experiment in Metabolic Engineering of Stress Tolerance," National Academy of Science Proceedings 91:306-310:1994.

Hickey, Michael. 100 Families of Flowering Plants, 1988 second edition, describes characteristics of stigma on Armeria maritima.

JCN. "The Great Thrift," The Garden, 3 Jan 1874, published by William Robinson.

Tauleigne Gomes, Cristina and Claude Lefèbvre. "Natural Hybridisation Between Two Coastal Endemic Species of Armeria (Plumbaginaceae) from Portugal. 1. Populational in Situ Investigations," Plant Systematics and Evolution 250:215-230:2005.

Photograph: Joystick Red Shades sea pink growing in front of a retaining wall with dead grasses, 17 January 2009.

Sweet Pea

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, red hot poker, vinca, rock rose, sweet pea, sea pink, hollyhocks, pinks, bouncing Bess, snapdragon, golden spur columbine, Saint John’s wort, some grasses.

What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer.

What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose, purple aster.

What’s blooming inside: Christmas cactus, aptenia, rochea, bougainvillea, zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Sounds of water fowl drifted up from the river yesterday morning as the sun came out after snow in the night.

Weather: Snow dustings last Sunday and Friday night; freeze and thaw between so the drive has been too muddy to drive in at night and too icy to walk out in the morning.

Weekly update: These are the times that try plant’s souls. Those whose leaves survived the killing frosts have since faced dumps of snow, then mornings below 15 degrees, and now daily freeze and thaw cycles where temperatures range between 20 and 40. Only perennials with extraordinary biochemistry can survive.

My sweet peas so far have stayed green near the base, even though leaves farther along the stems have turned to paper. Green peaks from mounds of dead leaves on vines near the village that pile on themselves in summer when there’s nothing for their tendrils to clasp.

The plants are an improbable alien in arid New Mexico. They don’t tolerate salt, they prefer a pH between 5.8 and 7.5. In their homeland, they range from Morocco and Iberia to the Balkan peninsula, then up the Danube. They quail at the deserts of Africa and Asia and haven’t scaled the Alps of Switzerland and Austria. On this continent they balk at the cold of North Dakota and the Canadian prairies, won’t grow in humid Florida, and aren’t a success in the Mexican deserts.

The rosy racemes need 14 hours of daylight, which begins here the end of April, to begin developing. If temperatures remain around 40 degrees, which they did in the mornings until the first of this past June, they take eight weeks to develop. In the best years, they come into bloom around the solstice, just as the drought season sets in.

Lathyrus latifolia needs at least 26" of rain a year. The ones that have naturalized here grow on the banks on irrigation ditches, where they keep both cool and wet. To keep mine from browning out, I dump water on them whenever the drip pan under the outside faucet fills. They stay alive with only sporadic flowers.

Then, after being babied through the summer, the yellow veined leaves surprise and stay green into winter.

Staying green means photosynthesis is continuing at some rate. For that to occur, the roots must be functioning, as must the stem. Even though the rhizomes store some nutrients, they need to extract others, including water, from the soil. In this part of New Mexico, the average frost line is 10-15". Established sweet pea roots typically reach down more than two feet, at least 9" below frozen ground.

Photosynthesis occurs in the leaves which must remain undamaged by cold temperatures which can destroy cells when the surrounding water turns to ice. Bengt Lindforss first noted evergreens in central Germany that survived the frost contained no starches, because they had converted the carbohydrates to sugar. He then established the ability of sugar to protect plants by lowering the freeze point of internal fluids.

Nikolay Maximov read his work, then injected red cabbages with some sugars (glucose, glycerol) and some alcohols to show each could increase cold defenses. Sucrose is the primary sugar in the roots of sweet peas on limestone grasslands in central Europe in summer, according to Franz Hadacek and Günther Kraus.

Polish botanists noticed sweet pea’s relatively wide, coarse pairs of leaves have large, irregularly shaped cells which would give them greater tolerance for any ice crystals that might form than smaller cells would have. They also found summer leaves contain relatively high levels of salt and calcium. If maintained all year, the first would lower the freezing point, while the second would keep cell membranes flexible enough to expand and retract with potential ice.

The leaves look the same, summer or winter, mere dark presences hiding leguminous roots that put some nitrogen in the soil. However, the external matte appearance masks their strategies for survival as completely as the snow hides their existence from the drying sun.

Notes:
Fuller, Barry J., Nick Lane, and Erica E. Benson, Life in the Frozen State, 2004, describes work of Bengt Lindforrs and Nikolay Maximov.

Hadacek, Franz and Günther F. Kraus. "Plant Root Carbohydrates Affect Growth Behaviour of Endophytic Microfungi," FEMS Microbiology Ecology 41:161-170:2002.

Kartesz, John T. "Lathyrus latifolius L.," USDA National Resource Conservation Service, National Plant Data Center.

Koike, Yasuhiko, Tomoaki Inoue, Shigetoshi Suzuki, Haruzo Higuchi. "Effect of Photoperiod on the Flowering of Lathyrus latifolius L.," Journal of the Japanese Society for Horticultural Science 69:770-772:2000.

_____ N. Kouyama, A. Yoshii, S. Suzuki, and H. Imanishi. "Effect of Low Temperatures Applied to Seeds and Seedlings on Flowering of Lathyrus latifolius L," Horticultural Research 6:525-528:2007.

Krstic, Borivoj D., Pal P. Boza, Ljiljana S. Merkulov, Lana N. Krstic, Slobodanka P. Pajevic, Zivko S. Stankovic. "Morpholigcal, Anatomical, and Physiological Characteristics of Lathyrus latifolius L. (Fabaceae)," Matica Srpska Novi Sad 103:81-89:2002, in English.

Sammis, Ted. "Frost Depth in New Mexico and the United States," New Mexico Climate 6:4-6:2008.

Photograph: Dead and green perennial sweet pea leaves in light coming through crack between fence boards, 10 January 2009.

Bougainvillea

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, red hot poker, vinca, rock rose, sweet pea, sea pink, hollyhocks, pinks, bouncing Bess, snapdragon, golden spur columbine, Saint John’s wort, some grasses.

What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer.

What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose, purple aster.

What’s blooming inside: Christmas cactus, aptenia, rochea, bougainvillea, zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: A popcorn eating mouse, come in from the cold, has been leaving droppings on the kitchen floor.

Weather: Sunny afternoons with temperatures around 40 have alternated with very cold mornings to thaw and refreeze the drive each day.

Weekly update: Houseplants on my enclosed porch have a very simple contract: in return for regular water, some occasional fertilizer and heat in the winter, they’re expected to bloom in January. The flowers don’t have to be fragrant, don’t have to be exotic, but they do have to be bright.

When the remaining snow hides from the sun in northern shadows and water collects on frozen ground or seeps through a thin veneer of soft mud, I want to look up from my desk and see color. Geranium red, bougainvillea pink. Color.

In fact, the plants don’t even have to produce flowers if they promise color. Bougainvilleas are members of the four o’clock family with tiny white, five-petaled flowers perched on wasp-waisted tubes that are attached to large, brilliant bracts that resemble reflectors placed behind candles.

In the Canary Islands, the fragrance of the flowers brings hawk moths when they first open in the evening. In the Lucknow botanical gardens, butterflies come for the nectar and transfer pollen between adjoining varieties. In South America, hummingbirds flit from plant to plant. But in Florida, where single varieties abound, the woody vines are sterile and only the color could have attracted Jim Hendry in 1927 when he began hybridizing them.

His grandmother, Julia Frierson, brought the first magenta-colored Bougainvilles glabra ‘Sanderiana’ vine from Cuba in 1875. In 1919, his Everglades Nursery gave 200 ‘Crimson Lake’ cultivars to Fort Myers, and made a second gift in 1922 when Carl Fischer was promoting a highway from the midwest to his real estate investments in Miami. Local businessmen, no doubt, were lobbying to have the road come through the town where Henry Ford wintered with Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone.

Of course, if one were wealthy enough, one could have seen them in Rio de Janiero where Philibert Commerçon first collected them in 1768 or noticed them on the way to the casinos in Havana or found them climbing the walls of an Italian villa where their thorns warned off intruders. Most Americans in the 1920's, however, probably first saw bougainvilleas growing in Fort Myers, for the western route of the Dixie Highway did indeed pass Hendry’s showroom on its way from Chicago and Chattanooga to Miami.

The eastern route, however, is the one people would have used when I was growing up, the one that connected Detroit and Knoxville with the Soo and east coast of Florida. My first sense of winter color comes from walking by the windows of the exclusive women’s clothing store in the nearest city that featured beachwear in January. Inside, clerks reminded customers it had a convenient branch in Palm Beach.

Now I’ve personally never been to Florida, and probably saw my first bougainvillea in Phoenix in the 1980's where they’re so common the peaches and pinks of the short-day flowers were muddy and mundane. Still, I know I owe my plant to Hendry because he released ‘Barbara Karst’ around 1940 and every plant in existence must trace its heritage back to a cutting from his creation.

However, the reason I bought it has nothing to do with him or Florida, and everything to do with Fischer, who made his money manufacturing headlights. For him, cars weren’t a safe trust fund. They were about racing at the Indianapolis track he built. They were about escaping midwestern winters down a smooth, broad way south. They were about providing an alternative to Ford’s monotonous black. They were about color, brilliant bougainvillea pink.

Color.

Notes:
Hendry, Helen Johnson. "History of Bougainvillea," A. W. Kelley’s Gardens website, 2007.

Zadoo, S. N., R. P. Roy, and T. N. Khoshoo. "Cytogenetics of Cultivated Bougainvilleas II: Pollination Mechanism and Breeding System," Proceedings of the Indian National Science Academy 41: 498-5-3:1975.

Photograph: Two Barbara Karst bougainvillea buds and a flower, each attached to the central vein of a separate bract just below the base of the tube, 3 January 2009.

Winter Mysteries

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, red hot poker, vinca, rock rose, blue flax, sweet pea, sea pink, winecup, hollyhocks, pinks, bouncing Bess, snapdragon, Jupiter’s Beard, golden spur columbine, Saint John’s wort, some grasses.

What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer.

What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, coral beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose, purple aster.

What’s blooming inside: Christmas cactus, aptenia, rochea, bougainvillea, zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Man down the road has brought in some hogs.

Weather: Storms moved through, dropping some snow on Monday night and Thursday morning. After warm temperatures melted most of it, leaving mud sitting on frozen ground, temperatures fell this morning to their lowest so far this winter. Plants still buried under piles of snow will be OK; I’m not sure about those with shallow roots in the thawed areas. 8:24 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: ’Tis the time for some houseplant to produce a brilliant flower to protest the soddeness that follows melting snow.

It won’t be the succulent I bought last July when the local hardware was selling off the orphans. The perennial came with a picture of bright red flowers, the names Rochea coccinea and Campfire. In fact, it has tiny white, tulip-shaped flowers in groups of nine crowded on elongating stems that are barely visible from a distance.

In the early days of the last depression, Bailey said Rochea flowers grow in dense terminal clusters, that coccinea sports bright scarlet, two-inch-long flared tubes. The only red I see appears along the edges of the pairs of elliptical leaves when temperatures fall and slowing photosynthesis drains away the green. Rochea’s ovate leaves are supposed to alternate along the stems; these form beneath the pairs of light-sensitive flower heads.

I suspect I have a South African weed that probably was grown in Estancia by McLain Greenhouse from contaminated seed. Had it been a cutting, they would have known. But then, had they known, poor Española is just the sort of place it would have been shipped to salvage the cost of potting soil.

The spring selection in the hardware associated with the smallest chain in town has been declining each year. Probably because the parent faces stiff competition from Lowe’s and Wal-mart, it’s been offering fewer plants each year, and the choices have been getting odder, as if the buyers were taking the lowest priced, remaindered lots. One year the only fruit trees the store received for its spring tent sale were peaches. Last year they got almost no tomatoes.

The more managers retrench in the belief people won’t be buying, the more they create that condition. People who walked in last spring and found half the usual shelf space devoted to annuals, and came back a week later to find nothing new had been received, didn’t return. When last year’s seeds arrived later than usual, I regretted not spending more time looking at mail order alternatives.

It was with some foreboding then that I opened the early batch of seed catalogs this week: fear they had retreated to offer less I could grow, panic that if I didn’t find everything I needed, I might have to go without. Of course my anxieties were met with higher shipping costs and the loss of some favorite varieties. The single colored larkspur had been replaced by a "new series" for "commercial cut flower growers." Jewel nasturtiums were gone from another and the Bright Lights cosmos banished to the "super sale" of the discontinued.

But then, I looked at catalogs from places I haven’t used in a while and discovered they not only had adequate substitutes and lower shipping, but tucked here and there were those elusive possibilities that tempt me to try something new: why not another variety of creeping zinnia instead of nasturtiums? why not pink baby’s breath in place of larkspur?

In the scheme of things, these alterations aren’t particularly radical, aren’t going to make much difference to any company’s bottom line. They’re just extensions of what I’ve learned works, the simplest kind of innovation. They aren’t nearly so daring as buying that weed last July, and, whilst that unknown may not be the bright spot of color I’d expected, at least it’s blooming, unfazed by the market forces that sent it my way, a quiet witness that even the lowly have a place in this winter of discontent.

Notes: Baily, Liberty Hyde and Ethel Zoe Bailey. Hortus, 1930.

Photograph: Unknown plant sold as Rochea coccinea, 23 December 2008.

Vinca

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, yucca, prickly pear, honeysuckle, red hot poker, vinca, rock rose, blue flax, sweet pea, sea pink, winecup, hollyhocks, pinks, bouncing Bess, snapdragon, Jupiter’s Beard, golden spur columbine, Saint John’s wort, purple aster, some grasses; arborvitae turning brown.
What’s gray, blue or gay-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer.
What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, coral beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose.
What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, rochea, bougainvillea; Christmas cactus close to opening.
Animal sightings: Birds were out Tuesday as soon as there was enough light to see, even though a low wind made it difficult for them to perch. Sunday the blue bird huddled above the porch post under the eave, obviously regretting the decision to winter here.
Weather: Sunday, wind and rain in the night before Monday’s fine snow that turned heavy after dark. The 7" in my drive has been compacting and evaporating ever since, but there’s still a thin covering in many places ready to turn to ice if it’s stepped on. 8:23 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Something still green for the solstice should not pass unnoticed.
The Vinca minor I planted in deep, dry shade in 2000 and 2001 has survived and produced a few flowers, but the trailing stems have yet to find places wet enough to root and expand. Even so, after this week’s snows the sparse, leathery leaves are green.
John Williamson noticed periwinkle in the "Unicorn in Captivity" tapestry produced in France around 1500 for François IV de La Rouchefoucauld. One group of five-petaled blue flowers appears with a carnation under the animal’s tail, where it signifies the promise of fertility. Another clump, beyond the enclosing fence near a pomegranate, is intended to ward off the evil represented by the white campion.
The unicorn hunt, shown in five tapestries in the set, climaxes when the male animal is killed on the solstice, after having been tranquilized by the attention of a young virgin. The animal’s immediate rebirth into captivity was associated by church leaders with the birth of Christ a few days after mid-winter, but has deeper roots in the annual battle, first suggested by James Frazer in The Golden Bough, between the oak, representing summer and the sun, and holly, signifying the winter that must kill the god-king so a younger, more vital man may rein.
Robert Graves noticed the same juxtaposition of periwinkle with the lure of fertility and betrayal leading to death in a French ballad from the 1100's in which a shoemaker representing Llew Llaw Gyffes is tempted by a beautiful lady into a large bed with blue pervenche flowers on the four posts. The Celtic sun god is murdered by his rival after she binds him with the runners.
Myrtle, as my mother prosaically called periwinkle, is peripheral in the iconography of these artifacts of high French culture, but its associations with death and fertility go back to those times when plants, not animals, were used to express man’s relationship with nature and the supernatural.
Around 1230, Guillaume de Lorris wrote one of the most popular romances of the period, "Roman de la Rose," which is set in May when, to quote Chaucer’s translation, "the erthe wexeth proud" and men forget the past solstice "in which that winter had it set." A young man enters a walled garden posted with warning signs of evil where he falls in love with a rose, but is imprisoned by the guardian before he can liberate her. The first flowers Lorris lists in the garden are violets and "fresshe pervinke, riche of hewe."
The thing I wonder is how a flower, for it is always the flower that is used, no matter how inappropriate the season, went from being the healing herb used by Romans for its astringent qualities to a symbol for the sorceress who lures a man to his destruction. One possibility is that when the Romans took the Apocynaceae north to places like Britain it no longer produced seed, and any sterile plant was seen with suspicion by people who relied on grain.
After the courtly culture of the troubadours passed, the plant that had been emblematic of destructive virginity became the magical tool to cure it. In London around 1525, the unknown man who published The Book of Secrets of Albertus Mangus prescribed a charm made from powdered periwinkle, houseleaks and earthworms to "induceth love between man and woman."
In 1650, Nicolas Culpepper associated periwinkle with Venus and told his English readers the French used an infusion "to stay women’s courses," the physical manifestation of barrenness and impotence. This use of tannin from the leaves persisted into the early twentieth century when homeopathists recommended lesser periwinkle for the heavy flows of menopause that signal the end of female fecundity.
Today, both pagans and papists notice the perennial: Magica D’La Luna proclaims violette des sorciers a Wiccan patron herb while Mary DeTourris Poust includes pucellage in her garden devoted to flowers sacred to the virgin Mary. The constellation of motifs found in medieval France may have dissolved, but myrtle still blesses both the solstice and Christmas with green leaves rising from the snow.
Notes:Anonymous. The Boke of Secretes of Albartus Magnus, of the Vertues of Herbes, Stones, and Certaine Beastes. Also a Boke of the Same Author of the Maruaylous Things of the World and of Certaine Effectes Caused of Certayne Beastes, 1525, edited by Michael R. Best and Frank H. Brightman as The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus, 1999.
Boericke, William. Materia Medica, 1901; augmented 1927 edition kept in print by B. Jahn Publishers of New Dehli; his description is "continuous flow, particularly at climacteric."
Culpeper, Nicholas. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal and English Physician, 1650's; 1826 edition republished in 1981.

D’La Luna, Magica. "Periwinkle," available on-line.

Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough, 1922 abridged edition.

Graves, Robert. The White Goddess, 1966 second edition.

Poust, Mary DeTurris. "Planting with Prayer in Mind, 7 May 2008, available on-line.

Tuckwell, William. Chaucer, 1910, grouped with early work, translations before 1373.

Williamson, John. The Oak King, the Holly King, and the Unicorn, 1986; the seven tapestries are now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Photograph: Vinca minor and dead June grass and iris leaves, 18 December 2008.

Orchards

What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, yucca, prickly pear, honeysuckle, red hot poker, iris, vinca, rock rose, yellow evening primrose, blue and yellow flax, oriental poppy, sea lavender, sea pink, winecup, pinks, bouncing Bess, snapdragon, golden spur columbine, Saint John’s wort, catmint, fern-leaf yarrow, tansy, senecio, Mount Atlas daisy, Mexican hat, anthemis, chrysanthemum, black-eyed Susan, purple aster, some grasses.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer, yellow alyssum, Silver King artemisia.
What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, white and coral beardtongues, pink evening primrose.
What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, rochea.
Animal sightings: Bird with chalky blue back around front porch last Sunday; rabbit tracks in snow Wednesday morning.
Weather: First snow Tuesday, along with first major power outage since the Thanksgiving fiasco a few years back; 8:24 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: The first thing my furnace man asked last week was "Did you get any fruit?" When I had someone up from Santa Fe, he noticed the catalpa, but this tradesman, like any true son of the rio arriba, saw the peach and wanted to know.
Small talk in the valley has its own rhythms. I asked after the apples and he said the only ones who’d gotten much were in Los Alamos.
This would be a hard year if we still followed the old ways that depended on dried or stored apples for food and fresh ones for cash in the fall. The spring cold spells coincided with blossoming times, and I only saw fruit on a few trees in the 24 orchards I routinely drive by.
Most of the orchards have seen better days. Belle Becker says her family sold apples on the highway to Taos to people who came from Texas to fill their trucks until "the deep freeze in the 70's." That’s back when Emilio Naranjo was at the height of his political power in the county. Now, many have gaps where trees have died and not been replaced. A few are used for parking, but some are still carefully maintained, the grounds plowed or mowed, the branches pruned, the fruit picked. One paints the trunks white, another puts plastic collars made from empty plant containers around the bases.
Commercial apples are relatively recent. When Francisco Domínguez visited the area in 1776, he noticed only peaches and apricots. But, by 1830, Josiah Gregg saw trees around Santa Fe grown from pips that had come north. The Santa Clara bought the small, thin-skinned yellow mansanà from Mexican peddlers and used them to seed small orchards. These manzanas méxicanas were growing in Chimayó when Don Unser’s grandmother, Benigna Ortega Chávez, was a child early in the twentieth century and seen in Santa Cruz in the 1930's.
Change came with the railroads. Not only did the Denver and Rio Grande open markets for local farmers, but the transcontinental lines provided a distribution network for Clarence Stark, who began promoting his Delicious in 1895 by sending free samples with mail orders. By 1900, those saplings had begun to bear, and people wanted the sweet, five-pointed fruit from his Missouri-grown bare roots.
A revived knowledge of pomology probably filtered south from Denver where Stark had been treated for tuberculosis in 1887. While there he established dryland orchards and made promotional trips, including some to Mormons, who’d brought their apple growing techniques from the east. Whipple wrote in 1914 that the apple industry was still comparatively young in New Mexico and expanding the most around Farmington. Delicious wasn’t yet among the common varieties.
The seedling Jesse Hiatt found in Iowa near his Yellow Bellflower tree around 1870 was probably just reaching the Rio Grande when Naranjo was born in Guachupangue in 1916. Mrs. Chávez remembers her father, Reyes Ortega, and Santos Ortiz brought the first manzanas americanas to Chimayó from Sombrillo. By the time Naranjo was in high school in Santa Fe in the 1930's, Red Delicious and its pollination partners, Jonathan and Winesap, had become the most important varieties in Santa Cruz.
There are no orchards left along the Taos highway at my end of town, and only a few places in the village have trees. The land in the one has turned commercial, that near the church was always too valuable for farming. Arboleroas were kept to the periphery there, like they were in Chimayó, where trees were banished to life outside the plaza.
Some of the early plantations were ambitious. The largest one today is six rows of 32 trees suggesting an original plan for 192. The other large plantings look like they were 6 by 20 and 6 by 16. More orchards are two or four rows wide and six trees deep, one to two dozen trees. When hard cash came from men like Naranjo’s father, Alejandrino, who worked the mines and smelters of Colorado, these were sizable investments.
Such abundance must have become not only a symbol of economic comfort in bad times, but also such a mark of success that people still buy a half dozen trees for their much-reduced lots. Dwarf trees a 92-year-old man can maintain without a ladder are planted in three rows in a fenced plot to the right of Naranjo’s home. When he died a few weeks ago, he may have outlived the traditional life that formed him and the political machine he built, but his trees, like all the orchards in the area, are outliving him. Next year, people may ask his heirs if they got any fruit.
Notes:Becker, Belle. Interviewed by Kevin Huelsmann for "The Villages of Española," Rio Grande Sun, 29 May 2008. Domínguez, Francisco Atansio. Republished as The Missions of New Mexico, 1776, translated and edited by Eleanor B. Adams and Angélico Chávez, 1956.Gregg, Josiah. Commerce of the Prairies: Life on the Great Plains in the 1830's and 1840's, 1844, republished by The Narrative Press, 2001.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.
Terry, Dickson. "The Stark Story," Missouri Historical Society, The Bulletin, Sept 1966.US Dept of Interior, Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975.Usner, Don J. Sabino’s Map: Life in Chimayó’s Old Plaza, 1995.
Whipple, O. B. "Apple Growing in the Western Mountain States" in Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture, 1914.
Photograph: Small apple orchard near the village, 7 December 2008.

Buddleia

What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae and other conifers, roses, yucca, prickly pear, honeysuckle, red hot poker, iris, vinca, rock rose, yellow evening primrose, blue flax, sea pink, winecup, pinks, soapworts, bouncing Bess, snapdragon, golden spur columbine, Saint John’s wort, catmint, fern-leaf yarrow, tansy, senecio, Mount Atlas daisy, Mexican hat, June and other grasses. Russian thistles breaking loose; ditch meeting this week.

What’s gray, gray-green or blue-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer, yellow alyssum, Silver King artemisia.

What’s red: Raspberry, cholla, privet, coral bells, white and coral beardtongues, pink evening primrose.

What’s turning yellow: Apache plume.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, rochea; first bud on Christmas cactus.

Animal sightings: Last Sunday migrating birds made a great din overhead, but the scattered dark specks kept disappearing into the cloudless blue sky when they changed direction and stopped reflecting the sun. The only thing I know is they weren’t geese, for they neither honked nor flew in formation.

Weather: Mornings mostly cold, nights mostly clear and starry; last rain 11/27/08; 8:31 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Whoever it is who decides what plants to ship to our local hardware stores always sends things that can’t survive here. Every year people buy the brilliant, cerise-flowered Salvia greggii, variously described as zone 6, 7 or 8, but are more cautious with unknowns that aren’t in flower. One woman walked away when the clerk told her the maple she was looking at needed to be taken in for the winter.

Then, at the end of the season, when these inappropriate perennials are on sale with 50% price reductions, some are willing to gamble. Two years ago, the overstocked stranger was Buddleia davidii. I bought two Monum at my local hardware that were immediately eaten by grasshoppers, then I tried two Black Knight from a Santa Fe big box that I immediately sprayed.

Someone down the road must have taken the entire remaining inventory of the plum-colored Monum, and this summer had three-foot bushes on irrigated land out by an outer wall. The butterfly bushes began producing lilac-shaped racemes at the ends of new stems in mid-July that continued into September. Mine were attacked by grasshoppers again, and grew only a foot with sporadic blooms in August.

But now my shrubs are doing something extraordinary - putting out new growth when our early morning temperatures are falling in the low twenties. Furthermore, Julie Ream says, if my tubular Black Knight florets managed to be fertilized, the seed is still maturing and will be disbursed sometime in January, while some Hungarians discovered they could root cuttings in sand in greenhouses kept as low as our daytime 45 degrees.

Seeds for these Scrophulariaceae were first sent to Kew Gardens from Yichang near the gorges on the Yangtze in western Hubei where the British had forced an open port in 1876 after the Second Opium War. The area was known for the quality of its tea leaves and oranges, and the first customs officer, Augustine Henry, was looking for new medicinal plants in 1887. Most modern varieties are derived from stock grown at the Jardin des Plantes and sent to Kew in 1895, perhaps from seed collected in the 1860's by a French missionary, Armand David.

Reginald Farrer became fascinated by plants in an abandoned quarry when he was a teenager, and, after leaving Oxford for a visit to China in 1902, returned to England to write a popular book describing his rock garden in 1907. The following year he raved about Buddleja variabilis, as it then was called, saying it was as luxuriant and gorgeous as any tropical, hardier than many lilacs, and bloomed in August.

At the same time, he converted to Buddhism, then returned to China a few years later with William Purdom to visit Gansu in the Tibetan borderlands. Among the seeds they sent back to Kew in 1914 where those for a dwarf davidii subspecies, nanhoénsis. The species is polyploidic and thus can easily produce genetic sports that may or may not survive.

The intrepid traveler visited Arras in war-ravaged France after the first World War, and came upon a Buddleia gone wild in the rubble, "exactly as I last saw it on the shingles of Tibet." Some sport of the plant naturalized on the lime debris of London during the Second World War, and many now fear it may become as invasive on the gravel edges of stream beds as it has in the kiwi plantations of New Zealand.

Before it was condemned by environmentalists and banned from gardens in Washington and Oregon, nurseries periodically introduced new cultivars by selecting mutations, including Peace in 1945. Ruy promoted the hardy Black Knight in 1959 which, coincidentally, produces less seed than most varieties. Monrovia introduced a cultivar of nanhoénsis in 1984 as Petite Plum or Monum for smaller gardens.

It’s since been the object of research by botanists trying to find better growing methods for nurserymen and by others trying to find ways to kill it. Farrer himself wondered who had planted the cherished "new rare treasure" he saw in Arras, before adding "not that it matters, or can make any difference to this scene of sordid modern ugliness in ruins." Perhaps it was a similar swing in taste that exiled this unwanted, paradoxically heat loving, cold thrifty plant to the shelves of Española. Farrer, himself, died in Burma in 1920 looking for more plants.

Notes:
Farrer, Reginald John. Alpines and Bog Plants, 1908.
_____ My Rock Garden, 1907.
_____ The Void of War: Letters from Three Fronts, 1918.

Ream, Julie. Production and Invasion of Butterfly Bush (Buddleia davidii) in Oregon, 2006.

Újvári, Melinda and Gábor Schmidt. "Mini-cutting Propagation - A New Way for Propagation Semi-shrubs," no source provided, available on-line.

Photograph: New growth on Black Knight buddleia with iris in back, 30 November 2008.

Corn Harvest

What’s blooming: Nothing; dead grasses and Russian thistles turning black.

What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae and other conifers, roses, yucca, prickly pear, honeysuckle, red hot poker, vinca, rock rose, yellow evening primrose, blue flax, sea pink, winecup, pinks, soapworts, bouncing Bess, snapdragon, Jupiter’s beard, Saint John’s wort, senecio, Mount Atlas daisy, Mexican hat, June and other grasses; iris, catmint, fern-leaf yarrow and tansy still have some leaves.

What’s gray or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer, yellow alyssum, Silver King artemisia.

What’s red: Raspberry, cholla, privet, coral bells, white and coral beardtongues, pink evening primrose; Japanese barberry still has some leaves

What’s turning yellow: Apache plume, golden spur columbine.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, bougainvillea, rochea.

Animal sightings: Large bird, maybe a duck or grey goose, in hay field in front of the house where chickens had been let loose earlier this year.

Weather: Why does it always rain, snow or sleet on Thanksgiving, as it did this week, when the holiday isn’t tied to any particular lunar or solar event? Congress made it the fourth Thursday of the month in 1941. Now ice forms on the windshield after dawn instead of the dry frost flakes earlier in the week. 8:41 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The problem with growing vegetables is sometimes you succeed. If there’s more than you can eat off the vine, then you must either can, freeze, dry or hope for lots of friends. My bucolic idyl of leaving the surplus for the birds was shattered when hornets arrived to harvest the peaches. Nothing is more unpleasant than removing rotten tomatoes in the spring. If you flirt with farm life, you have to learn it all.

Dehydration was the only preservation method used in this area. Squashes and meat were cut and hung, chiles were strung into ristras, fruits were sliced and laid flat. Corn will cure on the stalk, but was husked, then left to continue drying. The Santa Clara tossed cobs onto their flat roofs or platforms built from cottonwood poles, then stacked them in a storeroom.

Any child knows how to eat dried fruit or jerky. Cooking pinto beans simply takes time. Maíz is another matter, because it’s hard as unpopped corn and takes days to soften in water, or must be ground. Raw corn’s proteins are difficult for humans to digest and lack both niacin and the amino acid tryptophan which the body can use to create the B vitamin. When Zea mays was exported to northern Italy and Africa, pellagra followed; the vitamin deficiency spread in the American south in the early twentieth century when food processing methods changed.

Long before Cortes arrived, the Maya learned the secret of soaking dried kernels in an alkaline hydroxide solution that loosens the outer skin and removes the germ, at the same time it liberates the niacin. They grew it with beans that not only provided ixim’s deep roots with nitrogen but contained the missing amino acids that can combine with those of corn in the body to produce complete proteins. They probably also absorbed calcium that had soaked into rehydrated kernels.

The lowland Maya apparently burned the shell remains of pachychilus snails and used the calcium carbonate ashes in their soaking solutions. The ashes reacted with water to produce the calcium hydroxide that, in turn, interacted with the starches. As cintli moved inland, burned limestone was used instead. A generation after Cortes, the Aztec told Bernardino de Sahagún nextli meant ashes and was combined with water in nexatl. Today, treating corn with wet lime is still called nixtamalization.

The use of ashes followed maize into the eastern woodlands of this country where the potassium hydroxide from wood ashes was substituted. Neighboring English-speaking settlers used their byproduct from manufacturing lye soap with animal fat, hardwood ashes, and boiling water. By the time the USDA was telling women how to can hominy in 1912, Katherine Ola Powell assumed they were using household lye, salty sodium hydroxide, and telling them to leave the flat sweet corn in running water for three or four hours to remove the poison. Later, the University of Georgia extension office suggested baking soda instead, a sodium bicarbonate derivative of lye.

When corn moved into the southwest, early pueblo women ground the dried kernels on portable basalt slabs with carved out depressions. One of the men following Coronado when he visited the seven Zuñi cities of Cibola in 1540 saw mealing troughs made from sandstone slabs divided into three sections. In the first, corn was crushed on a lava or basalt stone into tchu-tsi-kwah-na-we. Next it was ground into sa-k’o-we, a coarse meal then was reground on a sandstone slab for o-lu-tsi-na. By the end of the nineteenth century, Martha Stevenson found two grinding mills, and sometimes a sieve, had replaced the second and third metates.

Frank Cushing saw Zuñi women in the early 1880's chew some of the coarse meal and mix it with the finer flour and water, then leave it to ferment, thereby increasing the niacin and protein content. At that point, they added ground lime and salt to the yeast which then was added to many of their corn dishes. Among the Tewa-speaking Hano of eastern Arizona, Barbara Friere-Marreco saw them add ashes from burned sagebrush. The alkalines not only change the color and taste of tortillas but make the dough more pliable.

Traditional Mexican methods co-existed with ground corn in a variety of foodways that converted what was essentially grass into something palatable and nutritious.. Cushing saw Zuñi women boil dried kernels with ashes for dough or grinding. Friere-Marreco found posole being made by soaking cobs, but the Santa Clara were using lime instead of ashes. She also saw no metates in the newer homes; women used coffee grinders to make the fine flour they mixed with water for atole.

In the same years in Chimayó, maíz was taken to small water-powered mills with horizontal grindstones that also handled wheat and chili, flavoring them all. Posole was made with lime, but all people remember now is that certain women with wood burning stoves made the most wonderful tortillas, "tan sabrosas."

Today, if you go into our local groceries, you can find frozen posole made from corn, water and lime or fécula de maíz made from corn starch ready for atole. You can also find frozen and dried maso for tortillas made from corn treated with lime. Peter Casados sells dried posole, chicos, harina for atole and roasted white corn meal for chaquegüe grown at El Guique, just beyond San Juan. Or, for flaky cornbread, you can buy degerminated American meal that’s been enriched with niacin and other nutrients.

Whenever you hear that simple tale of the feast shared by pilgrims and Wampanoag at Plimoth plantation in 1621 to celebrate the first harvest of wheat and corn, remember Edward Winslow was the one reporting they ate migrating birds and deer. The four women who survived the first year would have known the methods for handling that bounty were a cultural gift more precious than the seed itself.

Notes: Atole is a beverage; posole is similar to hominy; chicos are dried kernels cooked with beans; chaquegüe is a gruel or mush; maso and harina are flours.
Casados, Peter. PO Box 852, San Juan Pueblo, NM 87566.

Castañeda, Pedro de. Relaccion de la Jornada Cibola,1596, translated and reprinted many times.

Cushing, Frank Hamilton. Zuni Breadstuff, 1920.

Nations James D. The Maya Tropical Forest, 2006.

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

Sahagún, Bernardino de. Historia Universal de las Cosas de Nueva España, c.1577, translated as Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, Book XI - Earthly Things by Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson, 1963.

Stevenson, Martha Coxe. The Zuni Indians, 1904, reprinted by The Rio Grande Press, Inc., 1985.

Usner, Don J. Sabino’s Map: Life in Chimayó’s Old Plaza, 1995.

United States Department of Agriculture, Home Extension Service. Katherine Ola Powell, Successful Canning and Preserving, 1917.

____, University of Georgia. Elizabeth L. Andress, "Hominy without Lye," 2005.

Winslow, Edward. Letter dated 11 December 1621, originally published in A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, 1622; reprinted many times since and available on-line.

Photograph: Chiles abandoned to the elements, 28 November 2008.

Corn

What’s blooming: Nothing blooming, but burning continues; first Christmas lights out.

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, yucca, prickly pear, honeysuckle, red hot poker, vinca, rock rose, hartweig, yellow evening primrose, blue flax, sea pink, winecup, pinks, soapworts, bouncing Bess, snapdragon, Jupiter’s beard, senecio, Mount Atlas daisy, Mexican hat, June and other grasses near ground; only protected leaves survive on sweet pea and hollyhock.

What’s gray or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer, yellow alyssum, Silver King artemisia.

What’s red: Raspberry, cholla, privet, coral bells, white and coral beardtongues, pink evening primrose; few leaves left on apples, cherries, spirea and pasture rose.

What’s turning yellow: Some arborvitaes, willow, Apache plume, iris, Saint John’s wort, golden spur columbine; many cottonwoods and globe willows bare.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, bougainvillea, rochea with leaves bleaching out and leaving red edges.

Animal sightings: Rabbit at the front steps last Sunday.

Weather: Cold most mornings with dry air leaving flecks of frost on the car as it continues to steal moisture from the last rain, 11/10. High winds Thursday denuded the cottonwoods and other exposed trees, leaving them ready to handle the weight of winter ice and snow. Apples, cherries, locust, and other shorter or less-exposed trees still have some leaves. 9:08 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Raising horses and planting corn seem to be two ways men here try to maintain ties with their rural past.

Among the Santa Clara, the men were responsible for planting k’un and women took custody of the ears during the communal shuckings. By the time Barbara Freire-Marrenco talked to women in 1912, the young were turning to wheat for tortillas because they no longer were willing to do the arduous grinding that overdeveloped some hand muscles and could lead to degenerated elbow joints.

Whatever traditions existed among Spanish-speaking communities changed when the cash economy infiltrated at the end of the nineteenth century and adult men spent most of the year in Colorado, Wyoming or Utah working the smelters, mines and potato fields. Planting was left to women and children.

By the 1930's, Santa Cruz grew more wheat than corn, as did Chimayó and the Spanish speakers clustered around San Ildefonso, with hard-up flour mills in Santa Cruz and Española. The wheats brought into the great plains from Europe like the Red Durham preferred around San Ildefonso could handle our harsh growing season better than corn which even the Santa Clara could only grow in small isolated patches where water could be diverted or stored and that preserved the genetic identity of desired blue and white varieties.

Field sizes had already shrunken through divisions, especially after expansion into Colorado and east of the Sangre de Cristo was stymied by the western movement from the settled parts of the United States. Still people clung to those diminished lots as a refuge for survival, especially after outside employment disappeared in the early depression. Even after the opening of the national laboratory and conversion of the land in my immediate area to hay for horses, people retain their desire to own a piece of arable land.

Now those hay lands are being divided. Down the road, a small square hay field irrigated by pipes survives, perhaps financed by the single-wide perched on a narrow lot just beyond the fence. Periodically, a pair of horses was brought in this summer to graze the small area, and once in a while I saw the father from the trailer watching his toddler splash in the flooded field. He planted a row of corn along the fence, that grew taller at one end than the other as water seeped beyond the irrigation dike.

Closer to where I live, a cement-lined ditch bisects a large field with hay surrounding a new house where horses are often let out to graze. On the triangle between the ditch and the road, another family improved their double-wide and planted a patch of sweet corn, too large to feed the family when it all ripened, and too small for commercial sales. After the stalks had dried, he cleared them into shocks and later added a harvest figure, the only ones I’ve seen in this part of the country.

Between the two nostalgic corn patches some men converted a pipe-irrigated hay field into a market garden with corn along the edges and other vegetables between. I often saw the two out collecting produce for the local farmers’ market circuit when I passed on my way to work at 7:30. Their field was typical of the truck gardens that still existed into the depression that depended on tourists and places like Santa Fe.

The more traditional field lies across the road where several older men plant every few years. I don’t know if they picked the years 2003 and 2007 because they had signs they would be good years, or if they deliberately left the land fallow, or could only get periodic access to it. While it looks like it had been leveled and edged for flood irrigation, I never saw evidence they had water like the adjoining new house. They planted a full field last year that was four inches high by the end of June. In July I saw them out with hoes clearing the weeds. I never saw them again, so I don’t know how they gathered their crop.

I do know they did something none of the other local growers have done this year and no one would have done in Chimayó where clean fields "free of weeds, trees and organic debris" were valued: they left the stalks in the fields. Winter battered them, and someone finally cut the remains in mid-April. All summer, seedlings from last year sprouted, grew to different heights and then were invaded by pigweed.

I’m not sure if they didn’t know the full cycle of a corn field, as men wouldn’t who had had to leave every year for outside work, or if they no longer had younger family members around to help with the clearing. Dying, revived, and new traditions co-existed on my main road this summer while nature ensured the survival of maíz and fathers introduced their young to planting.

Notes:
Lund, Erin Suzanne. An Anthropological Examination of Classic Maya Burials from Moho Cay, Belieze: Skeletal and Dental Evidence of Demography, Diet, and Health, 2003.

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

US Dept of Interior, Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975.

Usner, Don J. Sabino’s Map: Life in Chimayó’s Old Plaza, 1995.

Photograph: Feral ragged corn dried golden by the sun and greyish pigweed; Russian olive in back; 22 November 2008.

Pasture Rose

What’s blooming: Freeze dried purple aster by front gate; many trees still hold dead leaves; one family has bagged their dead debris while their neighbors were burning yesterday.
What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae and other conifers, roses, yucca, prickly pear, honeysuckle, red hot poker, vinca, rock rose, hartweig, yellow evening primrose, blue flax, sea pink, winecup, pinks, soapworts, bouncing Bess, beardtongues, snapdragon, Jupiter’s beard, snakeweed, senecio, yarrow, Mount Atlas daisy, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, June and other grasses, alfalfa; only protected leaves survive on sweet pea, hollyhock, catmint, chrysanthemum and purple coneflower
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer, yellow alyssum, chamisa, Silver King artemisia.
What’s red or orange: Pasture rose, spirea, raspberry, cholla, privet, coral bells, white beardtongue, pink evening primrose.
What’s turning yellow: Cottonwood, willow, globe willow, Apache plume, iris, Saint John’s wort, golden spur columbine.
What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, rochea, bougainvillea; Christmas cactus leaves turning red.
Animal sightings: Brown bird with dark head in cherry; horses brought in to browse mown alfalfa field down the road.
Weather: Rain Monday with heavy frost on windshield subsequent mornings when temperatures fell to high 20's after dawn; 9:13 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: A run of mornings with consistently cool temperatures this year has given the valley something rare: fall color. Not only have huge cottonwoods changed into golden domes, but tamarixes and other small-leaved plants have transmuted into orange-shaded lattices. The sand cherries turned their usual purple, but here and there some neighbors’ shrubs have been the brilliant red of maples.
In my yard, the pasture roses have been the most amazing because they not only turned red, but the leaves glowed when light filtered through them. The maroon raspberries at their feet were comparative dullards, opaque ground-hugging triangles of hairy corduroy.
The reds come from anthocyanins, flavonid chemicals formed by interactions between sugars and proteins that protect plant tissues by absorbing ultraviolet light. They become more prevalent in leaves when cool weather slows the production of chlorophyl and other protective agents are generated. With many hybrid roses, the new growth is red until photosynthesis accelerates. On some cultivars, the leaves keep a red edge long into the blooming season.
In the fall most hybrid rose leaves darken, then dry and fall from stems that tend to stay green all winter. The only other roses I have that shaded into burgundy this year have been the crenellated rugosas. The precise shade of an anthocyanin red is determined by the pH in the plant sap, which in turn is controlled by the soil: the more alkaline the soil, the bluer the color.
Japanese scientists have been curious about the distribution of the some 550 anthocyanins so far identified. Among wild and cultivated roses they found chemical patterns identified three subgroups within the Rosa genus: one the gallica, chinensis, Synstylae (including winchurana, musk and multiflora), Cherokee, Macartney and Banksia, another the species of Scotch roses, and a third which includes dog, carolina, and cinnamon roses.

Volker Wissemann and Christiane Ritz found members of the last two groups did not share the same DNA patterns as the first. Others found the carolinas, native to eastern North America, are natural scions of Rosa arkansana and Rosa virginiana, both themselves natural hybrids of other native roses. Apparently, as the plants evolved on two continents, the chemistry of the American roses diverged from the Eurasian ones originally used to create modern hybrids.

I got my carolina rose through one of those impulses that happen after one has dutifully pruned one’s wish list to fit the budget, and then said, "oh why not" when filling out the order form. In 1998 I bought seeds from Prairie Nursery, blithely ignoring the warning that the "seeds are double dormant and require treatment to break dormancy and induce germination." When nothing sprouted I shrugged.

Four years later, in 2002, I noticed what looked like rose leaves in the drip line where I had dropped some 300 seeds and wondered, but I cautioned myself with memories of other briars that had looked like roses only to become unwelcome pests. Leaves continued to appear each year, teasing me with possibilities, and then colonized last year among the raspberry canes.

Then on June 10 a single pink flower appeared, and I knew I had grown a carolina rose from seed. That doesn’t sound like much if you live where pasture roses sucker into great thickets, but here the "dry prairie" of a Wisconsin seed company is only a wet dream. Even if all I ever get are leaves, I now know at least once a decade, when the fall is both cool and dry, I’m going to have the most spectacular red leaves in the valley.

Notes:Joly, Simon, Julian R. Starr, Walter H. Lewis and Anne Bruneau. "Polyploid and Hybrid Evolution in Roses East of the Rocky Mountains," American Journal of Botany 93:412-425:2006.

Mikanagi, Yuki, Masato Yokoi, Norio Saito and Yoshihiro Ueda. "Flower Flavonol and Anthocyanin Distribution in Subgenus Rosa," Biochemical Systematics and Ecology 23:183-200:1995.

Prairie Nursery. Wildflowers and Native Grasses, 1996 catalog.

Wissemann, Vilker and Christiane M. Ritz. "The Genus Rosa (Rosoideae, Rosaceae) Revisited: Molecular Analysis of nrITS-1 and atpB-rbcL Intergenic Spacer (IGS) versus Conventional Taxonomy," Linnean Society Botanical Journal 147:275 - 290:2005.

Photograph: Pasture rose, 9 November 2008, with darker raspberry leaves at bottom left and native grasses in rear.

Chocolate Flower

What’s blooming: Chrysanthemums in town next to wall, purple aster next to cedar fence, fern-leaf yarrow may have bud; vegetable gardens have been cleared, and some have been burning dead weeds.
What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae, roses, forsythia, privet, yucca, prickly pear, honeysuckle, daylily, red hot poker, baptista, sweet pea, vinca, golden spur columbine, rock rose, hartweig, yellow evening primrose now darker, yellow flax, sea pink, hollyhock, winecup, catmint, calmintha, oriental poppy, pinks, soapworts, bouncing Bess, beardtongues, globemallow, Jupiter’s beard, snakeweed, senecio, yarrow, Mount Atlas daisy, coreopsis, perky Sue, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, dandelion, needle, June, and other grasses, alfalfa.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer, California poppy, yellow alyssum, chamisa, Silver King artemisia; Russian olive leaves dead on trees.
What’s red or orange: Tamarix, prairie rose, spirea, raspberry, sand cherry, cholla, barberry, leadplant dropping leaves, coral bells, white beardtongue, pink evening primrose, tansy turning red, purple coneflower.
What’s turning yellow: Siberian elm, cottonwood, willow, globe willow, apples, apricot, Apache plume, iris, phlox, blue flax, purple ice plant, Saint John’s wort.
What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, rochea, bougainvillea has recovered from first cold nights.
Animal sightings: None.
Weather: Morning temperatures in mid-20's; last rain, 10/14/2008; 9:41 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: As anyone who has coexisted with a cat knows, domestication is, at best, a negotiated condition. There was Dusty who insisted on snuggling into armpits and weaving underfoot, and Maui who would plop into any warm lap. Then there was my childhood pet, who spent most of his time roaming the neighborhood and only came home to heal his wounds, and yet on those rare days when he remembered where we lived, insisted on sleeping on my bed.
Chocolate flowers are a lot like Tom. They don’t stay where they’re planted but reseed randomly, then spend their summers sprawling about the garden, covering some three feet with gray-leaved stems tipped by opulent yellow daisies. However, as soon as the weather turns bad, they huddle against the house begging to be brought inside the stockade. In return for reflected heat, they were one of the last flowers to open before morning temperatures plunged into the middle 20's this week.
Berlandiera lyrata is native to the western highland limestone shortgrass prairies running from Kansas down to México where Theodor Hartweg collected one on the way to Zacatecas for the Horticultural Society of London in 1837. The only people who seemed to have cared were botanists interested in defining the relationships between various species in the composite family.
Few even noticed the yellow ray flowers which often drop by noon. Many called it green-eye because the surviving lime green calyx maintains a dark center, divided into sections like a grapefruit. Then, it fossilizes into a tan shell with narrow dark seeds and a whitish center.
It still had no common name in 1930 when Liberty Hyde Bailey noted Berlandiera are tamable and "sometimes transferred to grounds." Still, the first edition of Sunset’s Western Garden Book ignored them in 1950 and the Denver Water Board overlooked them in 1996.
No one considered the tap-rooted perennial a serious garden flower until people began moving into the intermountain west where moisture was scarce and eastern favorites couldn’t survive the altitude, water and temperature extremes no matter how carefully they were tended. Even then, seed catalogs were careful to use words like "meadow" and "wildflower garden" in their descriptions. Only one actually described its selection as an erect dwarf.
Then someone, perhaps the German Jelitto seed company, called it schokoladenblume, and suddenly everyone noticed it has a pleasant fragrance, even here in arid New Mexico where nothing can be detected from a distance. It’s not clear if the name chocolate flower came from the maroon color of the center disk, or from the aroma. I’ve found no one who has identified the plant’s essential oils, but one perfume company, Cacharel, began to include it in one of its blends in 2006.

Chocolate flowers have been growing in my yard since I bought my first plants in Santa Fe in 1997, and they dictated the growing conditions. Fortunately, the areas they stake out are not places other plants want, and so for more than ten years they've been a semidomesticated part of the garden, elbowing the Mexican hats, black-eyed Susans and blanketflowers for lebensraum, coming into bloom by mid-May and staying as long as civilized conditions remain.

Notes:Baily, Liberty Hyde and Ethel Zoe Bailey. Hortus, 1930.

Bentham, George. Plantae Hartwegianae, 1839, edited by David Winger, 1996.

Sunset. Western Garden Book, 1954, edited by Walter L. Doty and Paul C. Johnson.

Photograph: Chocolate flower next to stucco wall, 1 November 2008; dark shadow is the green calyx.

Purple Coneflower

What’s blooming: Second generation snapdragon, single purple aster plant, chrysanthemums, one blanket flower, one golden hairy aster, chocolate flower near house.
What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae, roses, forsythia, privet, yucca, prickly pear, honeysuckle, daylily, red hot poker, baptista, sweet pea, vinca, golden spur columbine, rock rose, hartweig, yellow evening primrose, yellow flax, sea pink, hollyhock, winecup, catmint, calmintha, salvias, oriental poppy, pinks, soapworts, bouncing Bess, coral bells, beardtongues, globemallow, Jupiter’s beard, snakeweed, senecio, yarrow, Mount Atlas daisy, coreopsis, perky Sue, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, tansy, dandelion, needle, June, blue grama and other grasses.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, loco, snow-in-summer, California poppy, Silver King artemisia.
What’s red or orange: Tamarix, prairie rose, spirea, snowball, sand cherry, cholla, leadplant, white beardtongue, pink evening primrose, purple coneflower; purple sand cherry dropping leaves, barberry turning yellow.
What’s turning yellow: Siberian elm, cottonwood, willow, globe willow, apples, apricot, Apache plume, iris, phlox, blue flax, purple ice plant, Rumanian sage, sidalcea, sedum, Saint John’s wort, Mönch aster; catalpa, Bradford pear, peach, cherries, lilacs, caryopteris dropping leaves.
What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, rochea.
Animal sightings: Birds heard rustling branches but not seen.
Weather: Early morning temperatures flirt with 32 degrees, clear, starry nights; last rain, 10/14/2008; 9:58 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Some thirteen years ago I bought two purple coneflowers in Santa Fe for the garage. One survived and by 1998 had become established enough to put out multiple stalks and a daughter. The following year more seedlings appeared and I decided to help the process by breaking apart the seed heads, like I do with marigolds.
I learned one painful lesson. Not all composites are alike, and knowledge from one cannot always be transferred to another. If I’d been raised at a time when one learned smatterings of Greek and Latin, I might have known the root for Echinacea meant spiny. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s made this mistake: King’s American Dispensatory described the fruiting head as a hedgehog in 1898.
Later I realized this was the same Echinacea purpurea people were proposing as an alternative treatment for AIDS, cancer, the common cold, and whatever other condition could not be explained by modern medicine. I also realized how many made the same kinds of mistakes by thinking by analogy and how much knowledge has been lost since medical practice coalesced around William Osler’s 1892 medical text and the later formation of the FDA.
The plant promoted by King was Echinacea angustifolia, which grows on limestone plains east of the Rockies where many tribes used the large taproot for medicine. H. F. C. Meyer heard about saparidu hahts for snakebite from Pawnee and, like other doctors of the period, tested it on himself: he claimed he let a rattlesnake bite him in 1871, then bathed the bite with a tincture and drank some of the liquid.
Having survived, he wanted to market it commercially, and in 1885 sent specimens to John King, one of the leading eclectic physicians. King did more tests and began promoting it through the Eclectic Medical Journal in 1887. By 1903 it was so popular, King’s Dispensatory warned "it has suffered the usual over-estimation, and the exaggerated claims" made for new remedies. One even claimed it cured impotency.
Purpurea grows in parts of the Mississippi drainage and has fibrous roots which make it easier to transplant, and facilitated its adaptation as a garden plant. King’s handbook indicates it too was used with for medicine, but seems to have been limited to treating syphilis. Who knows if it was the confusion of species, the easier availability of the garden plant, or the association with sexually transmitted diseases that led to its first use for AIDS.
In the early twentieth century, pharmacists and physicians knew the significance of species, and also knew angustifolia roots from the Smokey Hills area of Kansas and Nebraska were better than those from marshes, and that methods of digging and curing roots mattered. Eclectic manuals described the roots in detail; chemists devised tests to distinguish good extracts from false or adulterated ones; dosages were clearly defined.
After the introduction of sulfa, the interest in angustifolia declined, and with it the body of knowledge accumulated by doctors accustomed to seeing themselves as natural scientists and pharmacists trained to judge for themselves the purity of their products. When coneflower became popular in the 1990's, researchers discovered commercial preparations, made outside the jurisdiction of the FDA, could use either species, leaves or roots, in varying levels of potency. Medical experimenters were no more knowledgeable about the differences and their varied results added to the confusion about the efficacy of the herb.
Since, chemists have suggested polysaccarides from purpurea may be the agent that promotes the growth of T-cells. Others have found purpurea extracts increase the number of killer cells in aging mice that lead to higher survival rates from leukemia. However, researchers are still trying to identify the specific chemical or group of chemicals that can be used in the replicable tests necessary to send something for FDA approval.
In the meantime, the ignorance that follows from a paradigm shift continues, especially now that malpractice suits are used to establish accountability. I have a friend who found Echinacea root for sale with no instructions for use. Since it was a root, she chewed it like she would a carrot. Her body spent the better part of two days renouncing her. Since that’s not one of the reported allergic reactions, she has no idea if it was the root that was toxic for her, or if it had been contaminated by a preservative or some fungus.
So while scientists are relearning the knowledge of previous generations of herbal practitioners, people like my friend and I are left to relearning the lessons of childhood. She’s a bit more cautious about what she puts in her mouth, and I’m a whole lot more careful about grabbing an unknown flower.
Notes: Eclectic practitioners were somewhere between homeopathists, allopathists, and physicians in the competing medical theories during the nineteenth century.Felter, Harvey Wickes and John Uri Lloyd. King's American Dispensatory, 1898, Henriette Kress’s copy available online.Gilmore, Melvin R. Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region, 1919, reports Pawnee use for snake bites.
Kindscher, Kelly. The Conservation Status of Echinacea Species, 2006.
Osler, William. The Principles and Practice of Medicine, 1892.

Photograph: Purple coneflower after first frosts, 26 October 2008, with Silver King artemisia.