Purslane

What’s blooming in the area: Few roses, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, honeysuckle, canna, datura, silver-leaf nightshade, bindweed, Heavenly Blue morning glory, narrow leaf globemallow, bouncing Bess, white sweet clover, goat’s head, yellow and white evening primrose, toothed spurge, purslane, lamb’s quarter, Russian thistle, pigweed, broom snakeweed, chamisa, winterfat, Tahokia daisy, French marigolds, Maximilian and native sunflowers, áñil del muerto, goldenrod, horseweed, hawkweed, wild lettuce, golden, heath and purple asters; hay cut, apples and peaches beginning to fall.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Golden spur columbine, hartwegii, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, yellow cosmos, chrysanthemum.
Looking east: Hosta, garlic chives, large-leaf soapwort, sweet alyssum, winecup, hollyhock, sidalcea, larkspur, scarlet flax, California poppies, pink bachelor buttons, African marigolds.
Looking south: Rose of Sharon, rugosa rose, Crimson Rambler morning glory, sedum, Sensation cosmos, zinnia.
Looking west: Caryopteris, buddleia, Russian sage, catmint, leadplant, ladybells, purple ice plant, Silver King artemisia, Monch aster.
Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy; more Sweet 100 tomatoes daily.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: Quail, hummingbird, gecko, yellow butterfly, miller moth, grasshoppers, ants, bees moved to sunflowers.
Weather: Hurricanes in Caribbean but all I saw was heavier dews and colder mornings; last wet ground September 2..
Weekly update: Even someone as inattentive as I was in high school biology knows there’s something extraordinary about an annual that blooms for only two hours a day, yet perpetuates itself in a clay pot with no visible sign of flying insects.
Purslane is one of those weeds I take for granted. I used to see it everywhere in Michigan, where its red stems spread along the ground in interlacing mats. The succulent leaves were never dense enough for a groundcover, but it didn’t get tall and rangy, didn’t clamor over other plants, and didn’t produce vicious seeds.
John Winthrop, Junior, bought an ounce in 1631 in London before leaving for Massachusetts Bay Colony. Since that’s about 280,000 seeds, he must have intended to grow it for food. No doubt it made the trip many times, sometimes in seed packets like Winthrop’s, other times as a stowaway. Purslane’s now spread to south Pacific islands where there are no familiar animals.
Here in the rio arriba, it displaced the native notch leaved purslane which the Santa Clara once minced to release the mucilage for gravy. By 1915, the old world leaves were eaten by both Tewa and Spanish speaking natives, with no nutritional loss. The newcomer contains vitamins A and omega-3 fatty acids, as well as antioxidants and minerals.
My plant arrived with a potted shrub in 2000. This is the first time I’ve seen the hermaphrodite bloom. It needs light, and apparently didn’t get its necessary eleven hours a day until the sun dropped enough to reach the east end of the porch. In other parts of the country it starts blooming in late spring.
The yellow flowers begin to open around ten in the morning to a maximum width of 5/16". Soon after noon the two sepals begin to close, pushing the five petals closer to the male stamens. Within 25 minutes, the petals fold over the stamens, pushing them towards the female pistil. In another 15 minutes, all the flowers are shut into mitres under the sepals.
When the pollen from the stamens falls onto the stigma, the generative cell produces a pollen tube, which reaches down until it pierces the embryo sac formed in the ovary. Cooper says fertilization is complete within three to four hours of contact. When the seeds are mature, the protective cap breaks away, leaving a tan receptacle bearing black seeds, which spill onto leaves or fall to the ground.
The next day, new flowers open in the base of leaf clusters at the ends of stems. In the afternoons, I can see as many as five buds in an axil, some still buds, some developing grain cups. If the season is long, those seeds may produce the next generation of flowers in four to six weeks. If the winters stay warm, it doesn’t die. If a stem breaks off, it may root itself.
The wind may initiate fertilization, but this flower depends on no such fickle occurrence in its brief fluorescence. Portulaca olearcea may be an old maid, but it is rarely a barren one.
Notes:
Cooper, D. C. "Macrosporogenesis and Embryology of Portulaca oleracea," American Journal of Botany 27:326-330:1940.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco. Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.Simopoulos, Artemis P. "Omega-3 Fatty Acids and Antioxidants in Edible Wild Plants," Biological Research 37: 263-277:2004.Winthrop, John Junior. Seed list, included in volume 3 of Winthrop papers held by Massachusetts Historical Society; reprinted by Ann Leighton, Early American Gardens, 1970.
Photograph: Purslane, 2 September 2007.

Garlic Chives

What’s blooming in the area: Apache plume, roses, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, honeysuckle, canna, datura, silver-leaf nightshade, bindweed, Heavenly Blue morning glory, purple phlox, bigleaf globemallow, bouncing Bess, white sweet clover, perennial sweet pea, goat’s head, yellow and white evening primrose, velvetweed, toothed spurge, purslane, lamb’s quarter, Russian thistle, stickleaf, pigweed, heliopsis, broom snakeweed, chamisa, winterfat, Tahokia daisy, French marigolds, Maximilian and native sunflowers, goldenrod, horseweed, hawkweed, wild lettuce, golden, heath and purple asters.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Golden spur columbine, hartwegii, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, yellow cosmos.

Looking east: Floribunda rose, hosta, garlic chives, large-leaf soapwort, sweet alyssum, winecup, hollyhock, sidalcea, larkspur, scarlet flax, California and Shirley poppies, pink bachelor buttons, African marigolds; raspberries ready to eat.

Looking south: Rose of Sharon, Crimson Rambler morning glory, sedum, Sensation cosmos, zinnia.

Looking west: Caryopteris, buddleia, Russian sage, catmint, leadplant, flax, ladybells, David phlox peaked, purple ice plant, Silver King artemisia, Monch aster.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy; more Sweet 100 tomatoes ripening every day.

Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Quail, hummingbirds, baby gecko, bees, grasshoppers, ants, squash bug, dragonfly; gopher active again.

Weather: More days passed with futile clouds, thunder and wind; Thursday and today the ground was wet in the morning for the first time since August 6, but plants continue to kill off their leaves to survive the dry spell.

Weekly update: Roses love garlic, or so the old folks say.

In her pioneering collection of folk usages and companion plant combinations, Louise Riotte suggested garlic planted near roses helps fight black spot. In a followup book, Bob Flowerdew repeated that recommendation and added the aroma of the one increases the perfume of the other. Website contributors believe garlic also discourages aphids.

Riotte was more definitive about the benefits of an organic spray made from crushed garlic. Biologists have established the bulb contains an antibacterial non-protein amino acid, allicin. However, the chemical exists in cells as alliin which only converts to allicin when the tissue is damaged. Researchers have also found that oil, almost any oil, enhances the effectiveness of the extract in water.

Scientists are more skeptical about the benefits of passive companionship. Entomologists in Kentucky found garlic chives did nothing to attract or deter Japanese beetles. However, Hsiu-chen Cheng found the same plant increased the number and variety of micoorganisms in soil tainted by PCB’s.

Fortunately, I hoped garlic would solve a simpler problem, the bareness of the wind scourged land above my retaining wall where only pigweed and Russian thistle volunteer. I also tried chives, scallions, onions, and Welsh onions, even Dutch clover, anything that would provide a green cover. Nothing survived a year, although clover and scallions each succeeded one, unrepeatable summer.

My roses have to settle for garlic chives for companionship, because they are the only plants that replenished themselves. The seeds fell from the retaining wall into the bed below where the floribunda Fashion grows protected in a corner with winecup mallows. This year, those blooming stalks are 28" tall, while the seedlings in the original bed are only 16".

The various Alliums are not as interchangeable as I’d hoped, although most contain some alliin. Even those with untrained palates know garlic, onions, and chives taste differently. Garlic chives, also called Chinese chives or Allium tuberosum, are more common in Asian cooking and gardens where, Penny Woodward says, they are cropped with spinach, lettuce, and pak choi.

What specifically separates garlic chive from the other Alliums within the lily family is fairly obvious to those of us who only look at plants. Garlic chive flower heads are larger than those of chives, and white instead of purple. They’re blooming now, instead of early summer. The leaves are flat like garlic, not round like chives or onion, and the entire plant is smaller than garlic or onion, but larger than chives.

Botanists need to go father and isolate binary distinctions. So far, they’ve failed to produce a definitive classification scheme. The Allium genera evolved early. After species separated, members in different lineages made the same adaptions, so now cellular characteristics are shared across evolutionary lines. Garlic chives and chives share five mutations, but are rarely grouped together. Garlic has apparently reverted back to the bulb form of its ancestors. They’ve all lost genome content.

Taxonomy is not my concern, but the bare spot above my retaining wall still is. Alliums are not the answer. However, nature’s decision to salvage the garlic chives has had an unanticipated aesthetic benefit. The five-petaled florets that surround my coral roses look like baby’s breath from a distance, and a bit like sweet alyssum from above. Companionship in beauty, not utility, is enough for me to hope they’ll naturalize there.

Notes:
Cheng, Hsiu-chen. The Study of Phytoremediation of PCP Contaminated Soil, 2005.

Flowerdew, Bob. Good Companions, 1991.

Havey, M. J. "Phylogenetic Relationships among Cultivated Allium Species from Restriction Enzyme Analysis of the Chloroplast Genome," Theoretical and Applied Genetics 81:752-757:1991.

Held, D. W., P. Gonsiska, and D. A. Potter. "Evaluating Companion Planting and Non-host Masking Odors for Protecting Roses from the Japanese Beetle (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae)," Journal of Economic Entomology 96,:81–87:2003.

Obagwuand, J. and L. Korsten. "Control of Citrus Green and Blue Molds with Garlic Extracts," European Journal of Plant Pathology 109:221-225:2003, discuses utility of oil.

Riotte, Louise. Roses Love Garlic, 1983.

Skorová, Eva, Jií Fajkus, Marie Mezníková, Kar Yoong Lim, Kamila Neplechová, Frank R. Blattner, Mark W. Chase and Andrew R. Leitch. "Minisatellite Telomeres Occur in the Family Alliaceae but are Lost in Allium," American Journal of Botany 93:814-823:2006.

Van Wyk, Ben-Erik and Michael Wink, Medicinal Plants of the World, 2004, discusses amino acids.

Woodward, Penny. Garlic and Friends, 1996.

Photograph: Garlic chives and Fashion floribunda rose, 1 September 2007.

Dahlberg Daisy

What’s blooming in the area: Apache plume, roses, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, canna, datura, silver-leaf nightshade, bindweed, Heavenly Blue morning glories, purple phlox, bigleaf globemallow, bouncing Bess, white sweet clover, goat’s head, yellow and white evening primrose, velvetweed, toothed spurge, purslane, stickleaf, pigweed, mullein, heliopsis, broom snakeweed, chamisa, Tahokia daisy, French marigolds, sunflowers, golden hairy aster, goldenrod, horseweed, goat’s beard, wild lettuce, chicory; two goats were eating where man tried sheep last year.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, yellow cosmos, chrysanthemums; first squash to produce fruit is an Eight Ball zucchini..

Looking east: Floribunda rose, hosta, garlic chives, large-leaf soapwort, Crimson Rambler morning glories, sweet alyssum, winecup, hollyhock, sidalcea, scarlet flax, California and Shirley poppies, pink bachelor buttons, African marigolds.

Looking south: Rose of Sharon, perennial sweet pea, sedum, Sensation cosmos, zinnia.

Looking west: Caryopteris, buddleia, Russian sage, catmint, leadplant, flax, David phlox, purple ice plant, Silver King artemisia, Monch aster, purple coneflower.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, tomatoes, Dahlberg daisy

Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Quail, hummingbirds, gecko, grasshoppers, ants, bees.

Weather: Last useful rain, August 6. After days passed without even a storm passing through and cooler mornings, some plant began to react: squash and tomatoes wilted, some cherry leaves turned yellow, ladybells went out of bloom.

Weekly update: Wildflowers don’t recognize political boundaries. They define their territory by soil characteristics too minute to interest cartographers.

Dahlberg Daisies like the shallow lime soils that overlay clay in the Tamaulipan brushlands that stride the lower Rio Grande on the gulf coastal plain that reaches to the Sierra Madre Oriental in Mexico and the Balcones Escarpment in Texas. R.E. Rosiere found the perennials growing with buffalo grass under scrub in Live Oaks County midway between Corpus Christi and San Antonio.

Move them beyond zone 9 and they become annuals. Gardeners in Plano and Gillett, Texas, told Dave Whitinger, their plants perpetuate themselves with volunteers. In Dallas, Sally Wasowski found no one who could winter them over, but a number who could naturalize them.

Move them to an area that gets more annual precipitation than San Antonio’s 25 inches, and they have problems with humidity. In Tampa, a Dave’s Garden contributor plants them in October and November after the humidity drops so they can bloom before it rises again.

Move them to an area that’s hotter and drier, and they die out in summer. C. A. Martin reports they will, however, reseed themselves for years in Phoenix.

Move them into containers or hanging baskets and they become a commercial product. Although they were offered in the mid-1950's by Thompson and Morgan as Golden Fleece, they were rarely mentioned by garden books until seedsmen began looking for plants that could withstand temperature and moisture extremes on decks and balconies.

Move them to my yard, and they survive the summers but don’t reproduce. I first planted them with marigolds, hoping to introduce some variety into my north facing yellow garden. The marigolds rarely survived the transition from nursery conditions and those that did usually disappeared with the grasshoppers.

Dahlberg Daisies have no such problems, although most years they remain fairly small plants with single composite flowers rising from bright green, ferny leaves. With last year’s moisture, the plants expanded in late summer and bloomed until late October. This August has been drier and my plants switched from flower to seed production this past week.

Book publishers care a great deal more about legal boundaries than do plants. Jean Louis Berlandier discovered Dahlberg daisies near San Antonio in 1829, but they rarely appear in field guides because the part of their range that lies in this country, the triangle of south Texas between the Gulf of Mexico and the Rio Grande, doesn’t have many book buyers, and the Spanish-speakers to the south are excluded by copyright laws and international distribution agreements. It doesn’t help editorial assistants that botanists changed its name from Dyssodia tenuiloba to Thymophylla tenuiloba.

Fortunately for me, nurseries have found a large enough outdoor living market in southern California and Arizona, that plants are usually available in Santa Fe or at a local hardware. I’ve bought plants with labels from Hardy Boys in Colorado and McK in Arizona. Most of the time, they arrive with generic Pixie labels that somehow suit a wildflower slipping from the rangelands of south Texas and northern Mexico into suburban life.

Notes:
Martin, C. A. “Thymophylla tenuiloba,” available on-line.

Rosiere, R.E. “Rio Grande Plains (Tamaulipan Brushlands),” range website.

Wasowski, Sally. Native Texas Plants, 1988, with Andy Wasowski.

Whitinger, Dave. “Dahlberg Daisy,” Dave’s Garden website with viewer contributors from ambercoakley, dale_a_gardener, and YardKat.

Photograph: Dahlberg daisies growing with blue-grey leaved California poppies and volunteer grasses, 25 August 2007.

Datura

What’s blooming in the area: Apache plume, roses, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, canna, datura, silver-leaf nightshade, bindweed, Heavenly Blue morning glories, purple phlox, bigleaf globemallow, bouncing Bess, white sweet clover, goat’s head, yellow and white evening primrose, toothed spurge, English plantain, pigweed, mullein, heliopsis, broom snakeweed, Tahokia daisy, cultivated and native sunflowers, golden hairy aster, goldenrod, horseweed, goat’s beard, wild lettuce.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, squash, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, yellow cosmos, chrysanthemums.
Looking east: Floribunda rose, hosta, garlic chives, large-leaf soapwort, Crimson Rambler morning glories, sweet alyssum, winecup, hollyhock, sidalcea, scarlet flax, California and Shirley poppies, pink bachelor buttons, African marigolds.
Looking south: Rose of Sharon, perennial sweet pea, Sensation cosmos, zinnia.
Looking west: Caryopteris, buddleia, Russian sage, catmint, leadplant, flax, David phlox, white spurge, purple ice plant, ladybells, sea lavender, Silver King artemisia, Monch aster, purple coneflower.
Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, tomatoes, Dahlberg daisy.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, white butterfly, grasshoppers, squash bug, ants, bees.
Weather: Another week when storms passed through to cool the air but kept most of their water; last real rain, 6 August.
Weekly update: Last weekend the local hardware was selling off plants that still hadn’t sold. They probably couldn’t give away the half shelf of impatien seed mats, once dormant bare root Stella de Oro daylilies, or pots of boxwood.
It would be nice to consider impatiens again. Their tropical pastel, flat-faced flowers remain open from the day they’re put in until frost, all day, every day. But that constancy requires a moister environment than we have, so they’re now a memory from time lived in a more temperate clime.
Instead, I accept volunteers that have adapted to my dry air, and mix blue flax that drops by noon with purple ice plants that only open in the heat of the day. Down the road nocturnal white datura flowers are wilting when I drive by in the morning.
Our deep-rooted perennial Datura wrightii is related to Jimpson Weed, but Datura stramonium is an annual with smooth-edged arrowhead leaves. Our nightshade has more triangular leaves with scalloped edges. Ethnobotanists report uses for the first from California, Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, while reports for the second are from southeastern tribes.
The Aztec knew the medicinal benefits of their sacred Datura inoxia, but also knew its dangers, that any part would kill. The mixture of tropane alkaloids can freeze the eyes into blindness at the same time they produces visions. The chemicals can alleviate bronchial spasms but also cause respiratory failure, can stimulate or stop the heart.
It’s perilous even to those who know it. The only tribes who distributed it to all adolescent initiates were in California. Farther south, Juan Matus hesitated to reveal it to Carlos Castaneda.
The Hopi limited it to shamans and the Zuni to rain priests who communicated with ancestors who had turned into clouds. Smithsonian researchers found it growing on Santa Clara stream terraces and talus slopes around 1910, but found no one who admitted using it. It’s not clear if that ignorance was universal, or if the select few who might have known the plant wouldn’t say. A Zuni creation tale warns the flowers are all that remain of two teenagers who learned forbidden things, then talked too freely.
Anything that mediates between two worlds, the living and the dead, the pubescent and the adult, is dangerous to the diurnal order. The pentagonal flowers come out with crickets that displace grasshoppers. Their narrow trumpets coexist with coyotes and gophers, long after ants and bees, quail and hummingbirds have gone into hiding. For descendants of medieval Europe, they cohabit with werewolves and witches.
My neighbors exile the rank smell to the boundaries between their land and the potentially threatening public road. But those plants did not just sprout near fences. The 5' bush crammed between a stored trailer and a broken pallet may be the relic of some Castaneda influenced hippie experiment with the unknown, but the 3' mound near the cholla cactus represents someone’s deliberate attempt to domesticate or perpetuate the wild.
As with most courtesans of the night, it’s beautiful in its prime. Just as light fades, the buds burst to release perfume that attracts white-lined sphinx moths. Next to them, impatiens would look tepid. Cultivated ladies and well bred, self-cleaning plants cannot compete with the excitement of the night.
Notes:Castaneda, Carlos. The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge, 1968.Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany database includes Matilda Coxe Stevenson, Ethnobotany of the Zuni Indians, 1915, and Alfred F. Whiting, Ethnobotany of the Hopi, 1939.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.
Photograph: Datura, 11 August 2007, about 10:00 a.m.

Hollyhocks

What’s blooming in the area: Apache plume, roses, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, canna, datura, silver-leaf nightshade, bindweed, Heavenly Blue morning glories, purple phlox, bigleaf globemallow, bouncing Bess, white sweet clover, alfalfa, goat’s head, yellow and white evening primrose, toothed spurge, English plantain, pigweed, mullein, heliopsis, broom snakeweed, Tahokia daisy, cultivated and native sunflowers, golden hairy aster, goldenrod, horseweed, goat’s beard, wild lettuce, side oats and blue grama grass; watermelons and pumpkin visible; hay cut and baled during the week.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, squash, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, yellow cosmos, perky Sue, chrysanthemums.

Looking east: Floribunda rose, garlic chives, large-leaf soapwort, Crimson Rambler morning glories, sweet alyssum, winecup, hollyhock, sidalcea, scarlet flax, California and Shirley poppies, pink bachelor buttons, African marigolds; buds on hosta.

Looking south: Rose of Sharon, bundle flower, perennial sweet pea, tomatilla, Sensation cosmos, zinnia.

Looking west: Caryopteris, buddleia, Russian sage, catmint, leadplant, flax, David phlox, white spurge, purple ice plant, ladybells, sea lavender, Monch aster, purple coneflower.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy; first tomatoes ripe.

Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Deer mice, hummingbirds, quail, gecko, grasshoppers, stink bug.

Weather: Rain late Monday; corn and sunflowers more than doubled their height.

Weekly update: Hollyhocks must be the easiest plant for amateur artists: all that’s needed are vertical lines, a few spots of color, and some flat green splotches. There’s no need for draftsmanship or botanical detail; they can be rendered with pastels or watercolor. Viewers recognize synecdoches and respond appreciatively. Hollyhock dotted landscapes are among the easiest pictures for Santa Fe galleries to sell to tourists and neophyte collectors.
Actually, Alcea rosea, goes through several phases in the summer, and not all are photogenic. The one captured by painters occurs in early summer when multiple stalks on older perennial plants are covered with buds, the lower ones are fully open, the middle half, and the upper ones just showing color. Leaves are still green and fully lobed, reaching up from the base through the lower flowers.

Artists rarely show what happens when those early buds dissolve into beige seed cases and basal leaves die or disappear into the lacework of insect dinners. Then, stalks grow a little to put out a single bloom, then grow again to open another cup. Some summers the bedraggled stems reach over seven feet, but rarely have more than one blossom at a time clinging precariously to the top. Then they overbalance and tilt, lean, and finally flop.

Last summer’s rain and last winter’s snow made this a very good year. Plants shot up early and flourished for weeks. But now, porches in the village are palisaded by brown spotted shafts. Some have been cut down along stone walls, but others still have spidery monoliths upholding their solitary mementos. In the past, those discards would have been burned to prevent the incubation of bacterial rust that destroys leaves.

Along walls where plants have been allowed to reproduce, a newer generation is opening. They’re shorter, perhaps because there’s been so little rain since June. New branches are appearing low on older plants, and producing new color several feet below the stragglers high on the main trunks.

Meantime, seeds have been ripening. This week the valises began opening to dump dark, flat discs onto ground, where normally the outer rings would bury the notched ends in soil loosened by drought, then dampened by passing rains.

Last year’s kernels began germinating the end of March, and now are expanding into hairy rosettes that should remain green all winter. There were more volunteers than could survive, but grasshoppers and weather are winnowing away.

When you glance at single Malvaceae flowers they appear simple to draw, with their protruding pistols clasped by stamens that spill pollen. The five overlapping petals usually have smooth edges, but some of mine are distinctly fringed, and more are simply undulating.

Most people here begin with seeds, but they never harvest the color ranges shown on packages, and rarely the dramatic reds and whites found in paintings. Instead, plants in the village this year have been pale. Natural selection has reduced mine to deep rose and pale pink.

Some flowers have white or yellow centers, while others are solid. I have one that’s pale peach with a rose center, and others have green-ringed yellow tears at their bases. Veins emboss lighter striations that relieve the monotony of broad monochromatic planes. Morning sunlight penetrates the translucent corollas, shadowed by clasping calyxes. Later, petals become so opaque, light bounces away.

In a gallery one has the choice of artists influenced by the sunny impressionism of Childe Hassam or the darker abstractions of Georgia O’Keefe, but the variations within the season, even within the patch, or on the stalk can only be captured by folk artists with simultaneous, multiple perspectives that capture the details one’s eyes see darting far and near, up and down, at the moment and deep into the recesses of memory.

Notes:
Hassam, Childe. "Hollyhocks, Isle of Shoals," pastel on paper, 1902.

O’Keefe, Georgia. "Black Hollyhock Blue Larkspur," oil on canvas, 1930.

Photograph: Single hollyhock flower, 8 August 2007.

Russian Sage

What’s blooming in the area: Apache plume, roses, rose of Sharon, buddleia, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, morning glories, datura, silver-leaf nightshade, daylily, canna, purple phlox, bigleaf globemallow, bouncing Bess, bindweed, white sweet clover, goats head, yellow evening primrose, velvetweed, toothed spurge, pigweed, mullein, Queen Anne’s lace, heliopsis, Tahokia daisy, cultivated and native sunflowers, golden hairy aster, goldenrod, hawkweed, horseweed, goats beard, wild lettuce, side oats and blue grama grass; apples much redder in orchards

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Blackberry lily, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, squash, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemums.
Looking east: Garlic chives, large-leaf soapwort, sweet alyssum, pink salvia, veronica, winecup, hollyhock, sidalcea, California and Shirley poppies, pink bachelor buttons, African marigolds..
Looking south: Bundle flower, perennial sweet pea, tomatilla, cosmos, zinnia.
Looking west: Caryopteris, Russian sage, catmint, leadplant, flax, white spurge, purple ice plant, ladybells, sea lavender, Monch aster, purple coneflower.
Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, tomatoes.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: Humming birds, ants, grasshoppers, bees in caryopteris and catmint; insect webs; something, no doubt heavy birds, has been breaking off sunflower heads before they open; flock with white bands at the ends of their tails has been eating something along the east fence; few cherries left.
Weather: Some rain last night after week of storms that blew through, but left only drizzles and moments of humidity; not enough water yet to germinate áñil del muerto.
Weekly update: In this summer when the most spontaneous enthusiasm is immediately channeled into a media event suitable for commercial tie-ins, it’s pleasant to think maybe Russian Sage is a fad that escaped its handlers.
George Bentham described the central Asian Labiatae in 1848, and it remained a British novelty noted by people like William Robinson, Gertrude Jekyll, and Christopher Lloyd until the 1980's when someone began brokering it to the merchants who serve serious gardeners of the upper middle class. Wayside Gardens first offered the species, Perovskia atriplicifolia, in 1987. It was also sold by Milaeger and White Flower Farm that year. I bought it from one of them, and it quickly grew into a wide, 3' high herbaceous perennial that didn’t die back in Oakland County, Michigan.
The gray-green cut-leaf near shrub began its diffusion from the cognoscenti around 1991 when Mellinger added it to the catalog. That same year, Milaeger added a Swiss cultivar, Longin, that didn’t sprawl. Spring Hill promoted the species into the world of mass marketing the following year.
Its first major media campaign occurred in 1995 when the nurserymen’s trade association named it Perennial Plant of the Year. That generated press releases for writers, extension agents and other professionals who produce plant of the week or month columns, as well as fodder for magazines that tout new items in their early spring issues. Since the award didn’t list a cultivar, the label was applied to any Perovskia, but most often to Blue Spire, which Milaeger had begun offering in 1993.
Despite the publicity, despite the appearance of Ernst Pagels’ earlier blooming Filigran in Milaeger’s Perennial Wishbook in 1996, despite the availability of older varieties in more catalogs, the species was still difficult to find when I needed one in 1997. I finally located a cutting in the back display area of a Santa Fe florist that was preparing to sell its land for development.
That was pretty much the state until 2000 when Arne Maynard and Piet Oudolf won best garden in the Chelsea Flower Show competition, and Oudolf released books on natural garden design with Noel Kingsbury and Henk Gerritsen. He’d opened his own nursery in 1982 and helped Aad Zoet form a Dutch grower’s cooperative to market perennials to wholesalers in 1998. One of the first plants they featured was Little Spire, patented in 2000 by Herbert Oudshoorn.
Russian Sage spread through the next tier of suppliers. One Future Plant customer, Van Bourgondien, offered Little Spire in 2001. Jung added Blue Spire in 2002. Santa Fe Greenhouse offered more varieties. But there the plant stayed, languishing in catalogs, not spreading to the cheapest outlets in Bloomington, Illinois, not available in the local hardware stores.
Then about two years ago, the two-lipped blue flowers were ubiquitous in late July and August. Monrovia, among others, was suggesting Little Spire was a good substitute for lavender. A friend tells me that was a bad strategy, because it you’re expecting the European herb, it stinks. Copywriters prefer to say "pungent" or "aromatic."
Others, including the Denver Water Board, were promoting the deep-rooted Blue Spire as xeric. North Carolina planted the aluminum-white square stems in highway medians, and the coronal racemes materialized in parking lot islands in Santa Fe where the dark purple funnels fit the sun-bleached pallette favored by southwestern designers.
Pots appeared in local hardware stores, but didn’t sell until prices were reduced at the end of the season. Then it was used like forsythia: at least four planted it as a specimen near the house, more than dozen put a single plant or small clump near the outer fence or boundary. None yet have the natural plantings promoted by Oudolf, but one has a xeriscape complete with gravel.
Someone down the road used them to line a straight, asphalt drive. The house is a simple, low two-story brick ranch set near the rear of a long narrow lot filled with genuine green grass, kept clipped. The walk to the house and head of the drive are screened by pruned, formal hedges. Everything reflects the abstract art that spawned that 1950's geometric style.
I don’t know if they originally planned to line the drive, or did it on impulse, when the plants were available. Two weeks ago they received another dozen plants, which they added to the other side of the drive, either to extend the design or replace dead roots.
Those plants, blooming on one side, becoming established on the other, represent the future of an overhyped product in the valley when, like this year, it’s no longer offered in the local stores. It will spread when people give away cuttings and suckers, or when people, like my neighbors, make a deliberate decision that it fits into an existing aesthetic.
Photograph: Russian sage growing down the road, 25 August 2007.

July Heat

What’s blooming in the area: Roses, rose of Sharon, Russian sage, buddleia, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, morning glories, datura, daylily, purple phlox, bigleaf globemallow, bindweed, white sweet clover, goats head, pink and white evening primroses, velvetweed, toothed spurge, first pigweed Queen Anne’s lace, tumble mustard, heliopsis, Tahokia daisy, cultivated and native sunflowers, golden hairy aster, goldenrod, hawkweed, horseweed, goats beard, wild lettuce, sand burs and grama grass seed heads.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Blackberry lily, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, squash, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemums.

Looking east: Large-leaf soapwort, bouncing Bess, sweet alyssum, pink salvia, veronica, winecup, hollyhock, sidalcea, California and Shirley poppies, pink bachelor buttons.

Looking south: Tamarix, bundle flower, perennial sweet pea, tomatilla, cosmos, zinnia.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, white spurge, caryopteris, purple ice plant, ladybells, sea lavender, Monch aster, purple coneflower.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, tomatoes.

Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Birds in cherry tree, gecko, hummingbird moths on large-leaf soapwort, ants, bees, crickets, grasshoppers becoming serious pest.

Weather: Storms continued to blow through with more clouds than water; days remained hot.

Weekly update: Burn out, brown out, heat stress. Whatever you call it, it happens every year as regularly as the earth revolves around the sun.

This year began the same. Ladybells came up as densely as a groundcover, then plants disappeared. Catmint started blooming, then stems flopped and leaves at the base turned brown. Perennial sweet peas started to bloom, then the leaves turned brown and died out.

Then something different happened. Despite day after day of 90 degree heat, some ladybells did not evaporate, but have been blooming since July 2. Six Hills Giant revived with new stems from the base that have filled in the bare spot with a mound of leaves and flowers. A couple weeks ago, my sweet peas put out new leaves, and two weeks ago their first flower.

Why?

Plants have simple imperatives. Chloroplast segments in leaf cells use energy from the sun to manufacture food from water and carbon dioxide, the one coming up from the roots, the other through pores near the chloroplasts. Summer heat disrupts the equilibrium when more water is lost through leaf stomata than roots can replace.

However, it’s not simply the midday sun. Plants like my squash adapt and wilt, only to revive in the night. Others close their pores in the day. Tamarix concentrate its photosynthesis in the hours after dawn. The controlling condition is that night temperatures must drop. If they remain high, plants can’t use their night shifts to replace water they sweated. So far this year, even if early evenings have been progressively warmer, early morning hours have stayed cool.

Water crises don’t just arise from a lack of rain. During the severe drought a few years ago, I continued to water beds at night. Even so, the native sunflowers got about a foot high, then stopped growing and eventually disappeared without blooming. This year, I have one 6' high that has its first flowers, and others still waist high and growing.

Back then winds that normally absorb water when they pass over distant reservoirs, full rivers and summer mountain snowfields arrived so barren they cannibalized water from plant tissues. Even though we haven’t had much rain since June, storms continually blow through and equalize water pressures between leaf sensors and the atmosphere.

The intensity of the sun at 6,000' and 36 07 N latitude also matters. Ladybells come from northeastern Asia, catmint from the Caucasus, and sweet peas from southern Europe. The first fails in July in Maryland, the second on the Georgia piedmont after a few seasons, the last during summers in the Kentucky foothills. Problems always appear around the solstice and begin to disappear a month or so later when sun angles change.

Microclimatic variations are so subtle that sweet peas can bloom all summer four miles away and nearer the river. Two patches are under old trees, the other in the sun in soil thrown along the side of a ditch. Closer to where I live, shaded sweet peas clinging to a chain link fence awoke from their summer hiatus Friday morning.

So what’s been special about this July?

Government weathermen only record temperature, humidity and precipitation, then for cities a thousand feet higher or lower than Española. Botanists can’t predict how individual species will respond to combinations of air and water without more research. Plants themselves are the ones who report afternoons this summer have been beastly but, if they’ve been able to protect themselves, it’s been a very good year.

Notes:
Anderson, Jay E. “Factors Controlling Transpiration and Photosynthesis in Tamarax Chinensis Lour,” Ecology 63:48–56:1982.

Armitage, Allan M. “Nepeta,” in Herbaceous Perennial Plants, 1989.

Scausey. “Adenophora Latifolia - Ladybells,” Scausey's Journal, available on-line.

University of Kentucky. “Lathyrus - Sweet Pea,” Kentucky Garden Flowers, available on-line.

Photograph: Perennial sweet peas with dead leaves in background, 28 July 2007.

Petunia

What’s blooming in the area: Roses, rose of Sharon, Russian sage, buddleia, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, sweet peas, datura, daylily, purple phlox, mullein, bindweed, white sweet clover, goatshead, velvetweed, toothed spurge, Queen Anne’s lace, tumble mustard, heliopsis, chrysanthemum, Tahokia daisy, farm and native sunflower, golden hairy aster, goldenrod, paper flower, goatsbeard, hawkweed, horseweed, wild lettuce, corn, beans; red showing on apples. Áñil del muerto cut down at house with sheep; English plantain cut down across drive.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Miniature roses, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, squash, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan.

Looking east: Small and large-leaf soapworts, snow-in-summer, bouncing Bess, sweet alyssum, pink salvia, veronica, winecup, hollyhock, sidalcea, California and Shirley poppies, pink bachelor button; one pink is back.

Looking south: Tamarix, bundle flower, morning glory, tomatilla, cosmos, zinnia.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, white spurge, caryopteris, purple ice plant, ladybells, sea lavender, Monch aster, purple coneflower.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, marigold, tomatoes.

Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, grasshoppers, crickets, ants, bees, dragonfly; hummingbird moths on large-leaf soapwort; whatever quail and yellow-bellied birds eat near my fence must be available now.

Weather: Hot days, cool mornings, rain late in week.

Weekly update: Petunias exist for one simple reason. They bloom. Any where, any time, all summer, they bloom.

They were bred to bloom. The first hybrid appeared in England in 1834, the year after sheet glass was introduced. They were grown in the new hothouses, then transferred to massed beds whose primary appeal was color.

They may have been smelly and sticky. They may have gotten scraggly as terminal flowers continued on longer and longer stems. No one cared, if there were enough of them, and they kept producing bright funnels of five-petaled flowers.

The first petunias I bought in Michigan in 1986 were Cascades that boasted large red flowers all summer. Alas, Pan American was replacing them with Supercascades that not only did not bloom, but died when they were transplanted.

Stokes told its growers it was offering Supercascades because they flowered three days earlier. When energy costs increased in the 1970's, three days meant three fewer days of warm water, heated air, artificial light, and fans.

The first petunias I had that succeeded in New Mexico were California Giants, sold by Burpee in 1998 as an experiment with heritage bedding plants. Theodosia Burr Shepard had developed them around 1900 in Ventura, California. They got leggy by the end of the summer, but they lived to bloom. Burpee didn’t repeat the offer.

I bought fewer plants, and each year what I did buy died. Last year, I found a better place to grow the ornamental nightshades, a more sheltered location with a little less sun. They survived between iris and hollyhocks near a retaining wall, but weren’t particularly prolific.

This year I discovered Easy Wave Cherry in a Santa Fe store. They aren’t the real Wave that sends out legions of emissaries, but a modification which is "earlier to flower under short daylight," produces "more flowers in the paks during spring sales" and has a more domesticated habit.

In fact, they may have been remaindered seed or a rival’s, since Kirin Agribio discontinued cherry in 2003, and resellers stopped offering it last year. My grower may have been using up left over seed or left over labels.

I’ll never know if they are what Daigaku Takeshita intended when he crossed petunia x hybrida with wild species. They don’t ramble like The Wave. Their rangy bare stems have been climbing instead, bearing small flowers since the middle of June.

It’s something to remember, three glorious petunias in twenty some years, each blooming oblivious to its obsolescence. But, oh to have had more from Shepard and Takeshita and others who know petunias are meant to bloom - not just in packs in spring - but all summer, in the garden.

Notes:
Hobhouse, Penelope. Gardening Through the Ages, 1992.

Stokes Seeds Inc. Growers Guide, 1989, 2006 and 2007.

Photograph: Petunias sold as Easy Wave Cherry, near retaining wall with hollyhocks and iris, 15 July 2007.

Squash

What’s blooming in the area: Roses, cholla, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, rose of Sharon, sweet peas, Russian sage, datura, purple phlox, bindweed, white sweet clover, white evening primrose, English plantain, toothed spurge, Queen Anne’s lace, bachelor button, zinnia, Tahokia daisy, first sunflowers, áñil del muerto, golden hairy aster, paper flower, goatsbeard, hawkweed, native dandelion, horseweed, wild lettuce; catalpa pods; corn, tomatoes, chili, onions, squash and other foot high green crops in vegetable patches that are not identifiable from road; local produce stand advertising cherries and peas.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Miniature roses, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, butterfly weed, squash, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemums.
Looking east: Small and large-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, bouncing Bess, pink evening primrose, sweet alyssum, pink salvia, veronica, winecup, hollyhock, sidalcea, California and Shirley poppies.
Looking south: Tamarix, morning glory, daylily, tomatilla, cosmos
Looking west: Lilies, flax, catmint, white spurge, caryopteris, purple ice plant, ladybells, sea lavender, Monch aster, purple coneflower.
Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, marigold, tomatoes.
Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium
Animal sightings: Gecko, pair of quail, smaller green hummingbirds, group of yellow-bellied birds, bees, hummingbird moths, ants, aphids, grasshoppers, crickets, squash bug, black widow spiders, Japanese beetles on yellow evening primrose plants, insects too small to name; gopher destroyed roots of baptista and two hollyhocks.
Weather: Hot, but some rain Thursday after midnight; mornings cool; plants still dying along the road, but established trees and shrubs growing.
Weekly update: My squash is producing its first flowers, all males. Luckily, they are the reason I put in seeds. If I depended on the females to bear fruit, I’d starve.
Every time I came home this summer to leaves wilted in the heat, I wondered if they would get this far and pondered the fragility of agricultural life in this corner of the world where people stopped putting in corn a few years ago when it was so dry and, before that, a neighbor told me the only thing grasshoppers weren’t eating were his tomatoes and cucumbers. Corn plots are back this year, but not my neighbor’s front garden.
Times have been hard before. During the depression, frost habitually killed half the peach crop in Santa Cruz, and apricots survived one year in four. In Chimayó, the wheat harvest of 1934 wasn’t sufficient to provide seed for the next year, and they never attempted beans or squash because of the "bug pest."
Farther back, when Francisco Dominguez visited the area in 1776, locusts had been ravaging crops for five years. At San Ildefonso, those who searched for wild food found little, and their neighbors were chary of charity or trade. He reported they had become "cautious" and fear had "hardened their hearts."
Nothing is as stark as the prehistoric Guaje ruin on the Pajarito plateau where the elements uncovered bones that were thin and porous from chronic malnutrition and calcium deficiency.
People didn’t leave here in the 1930's because they discovered cash would stave off starvation if they changed their diet. With the great drought between 1276 and 1299, Anasazi abandoned dryland farming in the highlands east of the continental divide for irrigated crops along rivers.
Who knows what drove the ancients to experiment with plants. The earliest remains of domesticated Cucurbita pepo have been found in a cave in Oaxaca from some ten thousand years ago, four millennia before corn appeared there. Then it was prized for its seeds which contain lutein, carotene and beta carotene; the edible layer evolved later.
Squash, including pumpkins, was important to the pueblo peoples who abandoned the Colorado and Pajarito plateaus. To the west the Hopi roasted the seeds, sliced the meat to dry for winter, and used the blossoms for soup. Here, the Santa Clara boiled or baked the mesocarp in a bread oven.
Cucurbis became more than food; they became a symbol for how people ward off hunger. Families to the west clustered themselves into matrilineal organizations, including the Acoma and Hopi pumpkin clans. Along the rio arriba, the Tewa formed two groups, the summer squash people, who governed during the growing season when fish could be eaten and wild foods gathered, and the winter turquoise people, who ruled when families lived on stored foods and hunted big game.
Squash is also more than dinner to people whose Spanish-speaking parents were the ones who first entered the cash economy offered by the national laboratory. They may not grow it much themselves, but they remember the taste of calabaza. It’s one of the few words that cannot be translated any more than can the pleasant childhood associations of life free of worry.
Notes:Domínguez, Francisco Atansio. Republished 1956 as The Missions of New Mexico, 1776, translated and edited by Eleanor B. Adams and Angélico Chávez.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco. Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.Smith, Bruce D. "The Initial Domestication of Cucurbita pepo in the Americas 10,000 Years Ago," Science 276:932-934:1997.
Stuart, David E. "Cliff Palaces and Kivas: From Mesa Verdeto Bandelier," Glimpses of the Ancient Southwest, 1985.
US Dept of Interior. Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975.

Whiting, Alfred F. Ethnobotany of the Hopi, 1939, cited in Dan Moerman’s Native American Ethnobotany database.

Photograph: Male squash blossoms, 8 July 2007.

Bouncing Bess

What’s blooming in the area: Roses, cholla, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, sweet peas, Russian sage, datura, bigleaf globemallow, larkspur, purple phlox, purple mat flower, milkweed, tumble mustard, pink and white bindweed, yellow and white sweet clover, velvetweed, yellow evening primrose, wooly plantain, toothed spurge, Queen Anne’s lace, purple coneflower, bachelor button, zinnia, áñil del muerto, golden hairy aster, paper flower, goatsbeard, hawkweed, native dandelion, horseweed, wild lettuce, onions and squash. Apricots fallen near village. Two men were hoeing a corn field early Thursday morning.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Miniature roses, red hot poker, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, butterfly weed, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemums.

Looking east: Floribunda rose, coral bells, small and large-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, bouncing Bess, pink evening primrose, sweet alyssum from seed, thrift, pink salvia, veronica, winecup, hollyhock, sidalcea, California and Shirley poppies.

Looking south: Tamarix, rugosa rose, morning glory, daylily, tomatilla, cosmos.

Looking west: Lilies, flax, catmint, white spurge, purple ice plant, ladybells, sea lavender, Shasta daisy, Monch aster; buds on caryopteris.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, marigold; first cherry tomatoes turning red.

Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium

Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, quail, gecko, squash bug, dragon fly, large moths, grasshoppers, crickets; ants climbed stems for seed pods; bees on catmint and Shirley poppies; gopher killed large hollyhock.

Weather: Hot; storm blew through Wednesday, but left neither water nor cool air; trees, grasses and some plants browning; last rain June 27.

Weekly update: With summer heat comes flowers that persist on roadside shade and moisture Down the road, Bouncing Bess grows along walls and fences, much as it did when I lived in Wyandotte County, Ohio.

When I was driving to Upper Sandusky in the 1970's, I wondered how a European native cultivated by bronze age lake people migrated to marginal prairie lands in the midwest. It’s not ubiquitous like Queen Anne’s lace or goldenrod. Someone needs to plant it before its stolonous roots can spread through the damp soil to form long, sinuous colonies.

It could have been something simple. The leaves and roots contain saponins that lather when shaken in water. Claire Haughton suggests bargemen’s wives planted soapwort along canal banks to provide cleansers when they passed through. Today, Saponaria officinalis grows where the Ohio and Erie canal connected Cleveland to Akron.

Possibly German immigrants spread the perennial beyond the Appalachians for medicinal purposes: in the 1650's, Nicholas Culpeper reported they were using it for gonorrhea. Pennsylvania brewers exploited it as a foaming agent. In 1876, Severin Bechler, a native of Baden, arrived in Upper Sandusky from Delphos to the west to open a brewery.

Anyone could have encouraged the two foot plants that resembled pink sweet peas scrambling up both banks of drainage ditches near the road to Upper, but they were in a stretch with German barns and a Brethren church. In 1845, about a sixth of the testaments distributed by the county Bible society were Deutsche.

When I see it growing here I marvel again that it could skip the arid plains and even higher mountains to grow along a fence in front of a fallow garden. It’s unlikely anyone bought it. When I wanted the plant, the only mail order nursery I found happened to be about fifteen miles from Delphos.

It might have arrived with any of the attempts to improve the value of sheep, especially after wool supplanted mutton in the cash economy during the civil war. The Greeks used struthium to prepare yarn for dye. Fullers used the herb to shrink fabrics to make them more airtight. Textile mills planted latherwort along race banks to decontaminate fabrics before sending them to stamping plants.

In the 1940's, Curtin heard the plant called julián in Chimayó, while it was called clavelina elsewhere in the rio arriba. Julio was the local word for loom rollers; clavelina the Spanish term for pinks, another member of the carnation family. The Spanish call this plant saponella.

Any industrial or domestic uses had long been forgotten. Cattle had replaced sheep. Cheap, uniform, commercial yarns had displaced local ones when the railroads made them available. It never entered the curanderas’ pharmacopeia.

Curtin found people kept the five-petaled cymes in bowls to ward off flies. And they still keep them. Yesterday, the smooth, simple stems grew along three drives in Chimayó, and beside the road in front of another two homesteads. Here in the valley, people prefer the roadside where the sun faded flowers graced two places on the main road, one near the orchards, and three on the back road of the village.

Some say its called Bouncing Bess for the barmaids or Bouncing Bett for washerwomen or kiss-me-at the-gate for where it naturalizes. Others rule it an invasive weed. Me, I call it a welcome sight on a hot day, even if the stands degenerate when old blossoms cling while new shoots bloom

Notes:
Cobos, Rubén Cobos. A Dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish, 1983.

Culpeper, Nicholas. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal and English Physician, 1650's, 1826 edition republished in 1981.

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

Cuyhahoga Valley National Park. “Control Plan for Alien Plant Species - May 1990,” available on-line.

Haughton, Claire Shaver. Green Immigrants, 1978.

Leggett, Conaway & Co. The History of Wyandot County Ohio, 1884.

Sigerist, Henry E. A History of Medicine, 1951, reference to lake people from Christopher Hobbs, “The History of Western Herbalism, “1998, available on-line.

Photograph: Bouncing Bess, about three miles down the road, 7 July 2007.

Cholla Cactus

What’s blooming in the area: Roses, cholla, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, sweet peas, lilies, Russian sage, datura, bigleaf globemallow, velvetweed, purple mat flower, milkweed, tumble mustard, squash, pink and white bindweed, wooly plantain, toothed spurge, Queen Anne’s lace, yellow sweet clover, purple coneflower, áñil del muerto, golden hairy aster, paper flower, goatsbeard, hawkweed, native dandelion; apples visible from road.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Miniature roses, red hot poker, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, butterfly weed, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, first chrysanthemums; sour cherries more edible.

Looking east: Dr. Huey rose, coral bells, pinks, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, bouncing Bess, pink evening primrose, sweet alyssum from seed, pink salvia, veronica, larkspur, winecup, hollyhock, sidalcea, California and Shirley poppies, Mount Atlas daisy.

Looking south: Tamarix, daylily, cosmos from last year’s seed, rugosa, floribunda and Blaze roses; fruit on raspberry and tomatilla.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, purple ice plant, sea lavender; buds on ladybells and Monch asters.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, marigold, tomato.

Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Good sized yellow-bellied raucous bird on utility pole; humming bird; white, gray and black-with-yellow butterflies; bees, ladybug, crickets, ants; grasshoppers eating hollyhocks and buddleias; gopher active in neighbor’s garden.

Weather: Hot days cooling off later despite afternoon clouds and winds; rain Wednesday.

Weekly update: The cholla going out of bloom in empty fields stand as reminders of some time before. But when, I wonder, was that before.

Certainly before people settled the area where I live. Only one grows near a village road, and groups are scattered along the ridge to the Española highway. Across the arroyo more survive in a vacant field and a house once had a yard filled, but recent owners tore them out for their dogs.

There are no more cactuses for another mile and a half, then they appear in empty fields and isolated plants bloom in yards, two just beyond fences. I have two, my uphill neighbor has one. Between us and that last vacant land, another has surrounded a 3' shrub with protective rocks in the drive and a nearby neighbor has one by a fence with yucca.

They weren’t always here. In the Cenozoic, this area of alluvial Santa Fe deposits was tilted, the Rockies lifted and a rift opened. In those long eons, some 30 million years ago, the Cactaceae broke away from their portulaca cousins in northern South America, then began moving north.

With the ice age came waters from the north that eroded land and filled the trench to form the Rio Grande. The Jemez volcano collapsed, but not before spewing ash. Ours is the resulting dissected bench land that supports black grama and four-winged saltbush that coexist with Opuntia imbricata elsewhere. There could be no cactuses here before.

Sometime between the great glaciers and 1500 years ago, people in the dry valleys of Mexico, who knew more about wresting an existence from recalcitrant plants than our ancestors, began nurturing wild foods, including agave and opuntia. Pollen from cane cholla has been found in a pithouse near Petroglyphs National Monument in Bernalillo county from a time before pottery and corn.

Perhaps they came here with the Anasazi; pueblos to the south mention cholla more than local ones. Lucile Housley believes its existence near Jemez Pueblo, higher than its normal range, is because humans took it there. Several have suggested they need some active agent to move them any distance from where the fruits and broken branches fall.

Some say they are invaders who’ve encroached on the pure grass lands grazed by cattle after the Denver and Rio Grande created markets for cattle and lightening found less to burn. Others, that they are part of the black grama prairie we’ve lost and disappeared when stockmen burned the spines to feed their animals in bad years.

On the other side of the river, on pueblo and ranch lands where cattle still wander, they are simply there - part of the nondescript scrub blazoned, this time of year, by glints of magenta when tepals catch the light. You no more can see their swollen brush skeletons from the highway than you can know when they came in that far time before.

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

Flannery, Kent.V. "Los Orígenes de la Agricultura en México: Las Teorías y Las Evidencias" in T. Rojas & W. T. Sanders, Historia de la Agricultura. Epoca prehispánica. Siglo XVI. México, 1985, cited by Marco Antonio Anaya-Pérez, "History of the Use of Opuntia as Forage in Mexico," available on-line.

Hershkovitz, Mark A. and Elizabeth A. Zimmer. "On the Evolutionary Origins of the Cacti," Taxon 46:217-232:1997.

Housley, Lucile Kempers. Opuntia imbricata Distribution on Old Jemez Indian Habitation Sites, 1974, cited by Dunmire and Tierney.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany on-line database.

Photograph: Cholla cactus, 30 June 2007.

Blanket Flower

What’s blooming in the area: Catalpa, roses, cholla, prickly pear, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, lilies, Russian sage, datura, bigleaf globemallow, velvetweed, purple mat flower, milkweed, tumble mustard, pink and white bindweed, English and wooly plantain, locoweed, yellow sweet clover, goats head, Shasta daisy, golden hairy aster, paper flower, goatsbeard, native dandelion; white seeds floated through; harpoon needle grass and halberd downy chess and three-awn grass seeds attached themselves to everything that passed.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Miniature roses, red hot poker, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan; buds on butterfly weed.

Looking east: Dr. Huey rose, coral bells, pinks, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, creeping baby’s breath, bouncing Bess, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, veronica, rockrose, winecup, hollyhock, California and Shirley poppies.

Looking south: Tamarix, sweet pea, daylily, rugosa, floribunda and Blaze roses.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, Rumanian and purple salvia, purple and white beardtongues, purple ice plant, perennial four o’clock, sea lavender; buds on Monch asters and purple coneflowers.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, marigold; plants beginning to grow and put out more flowers.

Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird on coral beardtongue, geckos, bees, ants, grasshoppers, squash bug, small tan moth; white, yellow with black, and black with yellow butterflies; small, indistinguishable insects.

Weather: Hot days, evening winds, cool mornings; some days the air held fumes; some plants dying that were encouraged by wet spring but are not near water or have weak roots; others spurting with heat; last rain June 11.

Weekly update: Thursday marked mid-summer’s eve and the last of the rose-hued flowers of spring are blooming. If there are to be more flowers this summer, they must be the yellow composites of the American prairie.

Retail nurseries know this and plantsmen continually watch for tamer possibilities for small gardens and decks. It’s been years since they first introduced blanket flowers that formed low mounds skimmed by large flowers. Ernst Benary began marketing the latest, Arizona Sun, in 2005.

These tetraploid Gaillardia x grandifloras resulted from crosses between perennial arista and annual pulchella. The first, native to the northern plains, has single terminal flowers on hairy stalks that flop in good soil and long-lived taproots. The second, recognized by the western Keres speakers of Cibola county, has a longer blooming season.

Now breeders are eliminating the garish orange-red petals with yellow notched tips. Last year, Georg Uebelhart released Amber Wheels, a muted yellow aristata selection with a milk chocolate core. Rosemary Hardy patented a pastel child of Dazzler as Oranges and Lemons in 2004.

Last summer my neighbor bought some Arizona Sun and Amber Wheels. She set them more than a foot apart, which emphasized their contained habit. As summer stretched into the cool autumn and she continued feeding them, the plants doubled in size, the spaces between them shrank, and the mounds collapsed into shapeless jumbles of recumbent stems. I almost liked what they became.

Then, miraculously, they put out new leaves the end of March I was so impressed by their hardiness, I bought some special varieties myself. The existing buds on the Oranges and Lemons opened, then no more. Nothing yet from Arizona Sun. I still don’t like them very much.

When I first considered blanket flowers in 1996, the only potted variety available was Goblin, promoted as an 8"-12" dwarf. It lasted a few years, then died out. Allan Armitage blames that on the pulchella heritage. It’s one of the few plants I didn’t regret losing. It was a matter of proportions. The flowers were too large for the compact plant, and looked freakish.

Since I couldn’t buy simple, full-sized Gaillardia like my mother grew, I resorted to seeds sold as aristata. Instead of disciplined hemispheres, I whelped scraggly single stems that behaved like biennials and were probably grandiflora hybrids. If there were too many of them, the consistent shading from red to yellow seemed mechanized and strident.

I have a hard time recalling why I’m growing something that doesn't look good as a specimen or in clusters, in its native coloring or disguised for subdued suburbs. But this summer I remember. After last year’s wet summer nurtured seed and this year’s wet fostered seedlings, I have a bed filled with coreopsis, golden-spur columbine and blacked-eyed Susans, each in a self-selected area. Scattered between are blanket flowers.

Unlike roses and azaleas that need a background of green, blanket flowers require more color, dense color, denser that a single plant, denser than it can amass by itself. When it’s growing among the coreopsis, the edges diffuse into the surrounding yellows, leaving shadows. Like a baritone among the tenors or the drum below the fifes, the sheer vitality of the burnt orange transfigures the monolith yellows.

Notes: Armitage, Allan M. Herbaceous Perennial Plants, 1989.

Hardy, Rosemary. Patent application for "Gaillardia Plant Named ‘Oranges and Lemons’," 2004.

Swank, George R. The Ethnobotany of the Acoma and Laguna Indians, 1932, cited in Dan Moerman’s Native American Ethnobotany on-line database.

Vickerman, Larry, collector of seed that became Amber Wheels. "A Better Gaillardia," available on-line.

Photograph: Blanket flower and coreopsis grown from seed, 10 June 2007.

Floribunda

What’s blooming in the area: Catalpa, hybrid roses, cholla, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, daylily, fern-leaf globemallow, purple salvia, velvetweed, purple mat flower, amaranth, milkweed, tumble mustard, pink and white bindweed, English and wooly plantain, locoweed, yellow sweet clover, golden hairy aster, goatsbeard, hawkweed, native and common dandelion, grama grasses; goatshead and prostate knotweed showed up; corn and sunflowers growing; rice grass releasing seeds; needle grass seeds becoming a nuisance.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Miniature rose, red hot poker, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat; buds on butterfly weed; sour cherries turning red

Looking east: Dr. Huey rose, coral bells, thrift, pinks, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, creeping baby’s breath, catchfly, bouncing Bess, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, rockrose, winecup, hollyhock, California and shirley poppies, Kellerer yarrow.

Looking south: Iris, sweet pea, rugosa, floribunda and Blaze roses.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, Rumanian salvia, purple and white beardtongues, purple ice plant, sea lavender, Valerie Finnis artemisia; buds on lilies.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, marigold.

Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird at coral beardtongue, bumble bees on blue ones; smaller bees on coreopsis, blanket flowers and catmint; ants on peach; aphids on roses; black butterfly on thrift seed ball; small grasshoppers bouncing everywhere; young male rabbit in drive.

Weather: Attempted showers during week, temperatures warmer; high winds yesterday, but little water reached the ground; strong manure smells along back road of village.

Weekly update: Roses are ablaze in the village, both pastel and florescent. Once again, I’m envious.

When I told a friend last year that my last tea rose from the year before had been killed by spring winds, he said, "oh, my wife, doesn’t plant stuff like that; she only uses xeroscapic plants." Apart from aesthetics and snobbery, her preference is probably derived from the perception that roses, especially those descended from the first Chinese teas, are too tender to survive without pampering.

As soon as roses entered the China trade in 1752, men studied them in their gardens. Around 1802, John Champneys discovered Rosa chinensis had yoked itself with Rosa moschata on his Charleston area plantation. His neighbor, Philippe Noisette, experimented with the seedlings, and sent his fledglings to his brother in Paris, whose nursery introduced the first tender Noisette in 1814.

Rose multiflora arrived in Europe from the newly opened Japan in 1860. Scmitt tried it with different hybrids before releasing Aglaia in 1896 from a Noisette. He sold the yellow rambler through the Rhineland’s Peter Lambert, who promoted an Aglaia seedling as Trier in 1904.

Wilhelm Kordes opened his nursery in Holstein in 1887, and soon after sold Lambert’s roses. His son, Wilhelm II, united Trier with a polyantha to produce a hybrid musk. While invigorating the Mediterranean moschata, he fortuitously intensified the multiflora heritage because polyanthas had evolved from Jean-Baptiste Guillot’s attempts to combine the flower clusters of multiflora with the repeat blooming and bush habit of chinensis.

Meanwhile, Svend Poulsen was commingling polyanthas with hybrid teas to increase flower size. When Jackson and Perkins hired the son of a French cotton mill owner to establish their breeding program in 1930, Jean Henri Nicolas not only extended the Dane’s experiments with polyanthas, which he called floribundas, but also negotiated exclusive marketing rights for Kordes roses in this country.

His assistant, Eugene Boerner, had become a close friend of Wilhelm II by the time he removed 10,000 seedlings from Europe in 1939. Later, Bourner crossed a Kordes tea rose, Crimson Glory, with a Kordes floribunda, Pinocchio, to beget Fashion in 1949. In 1952, he marketed one of Fashion’s children as Ma Perkins. A Ma Perkins scion was introduced as Gene Boerner in 1968, two years after his death.

The only rose I have that has survived drought, cold winters, high winds and grasshoppers is a coral pink Fashion I bought in 2000. The only rose I added last spring that’s blooming is a pale pink Gene Boerner. Both are large flowered, clustered headed floribundas.

Apparently, I owe my ability to grow my own roses to one Wisconsin born grandson of Saxon immigrants who absorbed continental breeding ideas. When Americans encountered Rosa multiflora in 1866, they saw utilitarian graft stock for the preferred tenderer roses.

In the 1930's, the government promoted multiflora for erosion control, because it grows on bad soils, including claypan, sand and gravel, to naturalize by seeds, suckers and rooted branches. More importantly, it tolerates dry conditions.

Fortunately, germplasm, even in the most refined tea, diffuses men’s ideas of the possible so that when I go to the local store to buy cheap roses, it offers floribundas, polyanthas and climbers amongst the hybrid teas because they all bear large bright flowers in black pots. I’m anxious to know if the ones that survive this year, if any, are the ones with the indefatigable multiflora ancestors, or if the floribunda is yet one more chimera in my quest for roses on my windswept prairie.

Photograph: Gene Boerner, floribunda rose, 10 June 2007.

Golden Spur Columbine

What’s blooming in the area: Catalpa, four-winged saltbush, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, sweet pea, locoweed, oxalis, yellow sweet clover, oriental poppy, fern-leaf globemallow, purple salvia, white evening primrose, scarlet beeblossom, velvetweed, purple mat flower, tumble mustard, bindweed, wooly plantain, goatsbeard, hawkweed, native dandelion, Apache plume, pink shrub, tea and other hybrid roses; rice and black grama grass. Needle grass seeds are beginning to stick to pant legs, three awn grass seeds beginning to work loose; pink evening primroses back in yard where Japanese beetles decimated them in 2003. One farmer is letting bales of hale cure in his field.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Miniature rose, red hot poker, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat; buds on butterfly weed.

Looking east: Dr. Huey rose, coral bells, thrift, pinks, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, creeping baby’s breath, catchfly, pink salvia, rockrose, winecup, California poppy, Mount Atlas daisy, Kellerer yarrow; buds on bouncing Bess, Shirley poppy and hollyhock.

Looking south: Weigela, beauty bush, spirea, iris, rugosa, floribunda and Blaze roses; buds on daylily.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, purple and white beardtongues, Valerie Finnis artemisia; buds on lilies, sea lavender and Rumanian salvia.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, marigold; buds on acorn squash.

Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, gecko, bees on baptista and catmint, white butterfly on snapdragons, grasshoppers, ants, stink bugs.

Weather: Warming days and cold nights; rain last Sunday and yesterday; high winds Wednesday knocked fruit off peach, broke branches on locust and deflowered shrubs and trees.

Weekly update: My golden spur columbine is as much a wildflower as the novel Ramona is a realistic description of Indian life.

It’s not that they didn’t begin life as wildflowers and history, but that over time they changed into garden plants and a romanticized view of the past. When Henry King filmed Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel in 1936, he cast Loretta Young as the half-breed girl and Don Ameche as the Indian. It would have been impossible to do otherwise with a story of white reactions to miscegenation.

If my plants were still the species, the two seedlings I bought in 1997 would have died by now. Instead, they fill an area 5' by 8'. Two years ago, the grasshoppers left mere stubs that didn’t bloom last year. But now, they’re back.

Golden columbines have been slowing disappearing since the Pleistocine. Today, they grow in moist canyons east of the Continental Divide, usually in areas with igneous rock. Mine grow in sand and clay derived from volcanic ash in an area with morning and late afternoon shade.

Large-winged hawkmoths, with tongues that reach through the flower to the nectar in the spurs, are the species’ most important pollinator. The only sphingids I’ve noticed here were hummingbird moths in 2000 and 2001 in other parts of the yard. So far as I know, I’ve never seen a white-lined sphinx which feeds on columbine and is reported in Rio Arriba county.

The male anthers in the species mature earlier than the female organs, so they can only produce seed when moths transfer pollen from one flower to another. Then, the seed germinates best when air temperatures are between 77 in the day and 68 at night.

My flowers still have the adaptations for the moths: the long tails, the open petals that don’t close at night and face every direction to ensure an insect moves from one to another. However, commercial breeders like Keift Bloemzaden could not have afforded to perpetuate such idiosyncratic reproductive requirements.

Even though found primarily in New Mexico, Arizona, Texas and Mexico, seeds from the Colorado exclave are probably the ones used by early breeders. Silver mining that began near Georgetown in 1864 attracted the Union Pacific. Transportation, in turn, brought cultured tourists. Harvard botanist Asa Gray visited the area in 1872, when Charles Parry named a mountain for him. A year later, Gray officially described Aquilegia chrysantha.

A mere five years later, Jackson went to Colorado Springs looking for a clean air for her lungs. On her carriage rides into the Cheyenne mountains, she saw the columbines in ravines and had heard their Latin name.

Since European columbines were known to interbreed, plantsmen in eastern America and Europe would have been eager to experiment. Robert Nold believes most of the commercially available flowers today are "Yellow Queen" or one of its descendants.

Anything that can crossbreed or reproduce like my columbines is free to become a wildflower again. Jackson’s allusions to such variability of the species are still too controversial to admit historic re-enactments on her novel. At most, if anyone dared film Ramona today, Hispanic and Indian actors would be hired.

Notes:Gray, Asa. American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Proceedings 8:621:1873, cited by Nold.

Jackson, Helen Hunt. "The Procession of Flowers in Colorado," Bits of Travel at Home, 1878.

_____. Ramona, 1884.

Nold, Robert. Columbines: Aquilegia, Paraquilegia, and Semiaquilegia, 2003.

Opler, Paul A., Harry Pavulaan, Ray E. Stanford, and Michael Pogue, Butterflies and Moths of North America, 2006, database available on-line.

Photograph: Golden spur columbine, 3 June 2007.