What’s blooming in the area: Roses, white sweet clover, pink evening primrose, winterfat, chamisa, snakeweed, áñil del muerto, golden and purple asters.
What’s blooming in my garden: Pinks, snapdragon, petunia, chocolate flower, blanket flower, chrysanthemum.
Inside: Aptenia.
Animal sightings: Ants.
Weather: Frost on my windshield Monday morning; last rain, 29 September.
Weekly update: Virginia Creeper. The very name evokes the Blue Ridge or primeval forests that greeted the first settlers at Jamestown.
I shouldn’t be surprised it grows almost elsewhere in the country. After all, many plants are named when they’re first encountered, before more is known about them. Canadians call it Engelman ivy.
Still it’s a surprise to have it constantly volunteering in arid New Mexico. Most of the specimens in the university herbarium are from counties along the Continental Divide, east of the Sangre de Cristo, or along the roads and railroads west from Albuquerque. Nothing from Rio Arriba or its neighboring counties.
The Zhangs and Shi tested Parthenocissus quinquefolia as a potential restoration tool in the Hunshandak sand lands of northern China and discovered that when the woody vine has less soil moisture, it transfers its growth to its taproot and alters the breathing patterns of its leaf stomata.
Here many of the places it grows are shaded, but some are in sun all day. Many, including those under trees, may have access to preserved water. The vines growing along fences may also have found water conserved by nearby roads. The liana is apparently very adept at exploiting soil, water, and light conditions.
Since it seems unlikely it invaded the Española valley by itself, it probably was introduced: the local hardware often sells rooted cuttings. I suspect the plants covering two tall cottonwood stumps down the road were deliberately planted, and I think the vine in front of a large pine tree hitched when they dug the tree up and moved it here.
It has erupted in my yard in so many places I thought maybe the seed was in the soil, waiting for water. But Van Clef and Stiles says that’s not possible, that the seed is only good for a season. Indeed, most forest herbs don’t create seed banks.
The seeds are spread by birds. However, less than half the dozen places it’s growing along the main road are near utility lines. The only vines that aren’t on fences, are in trees. Normally I drive in heavy commuter traffic when the birds have retreated to a few sections of the overhead lines; pigeons prefer the metal roofs of two out buildings. Birds don’t perch everywhere Virginia creeper grows.
In my yard, birds occasionally land on one of the fences, but not the fences where Virginia creeper has attempted to grow. Various types of birds have nested in my porch, in my garage, and in my neighbor’s metal barn. A number of the seedlings have sprouted near the eaves or down wind or downhill from the undereave entry points. Virginia creeper has been growing next to my neighbor’s barn since at least 1997, but didn’t start to put many vines through or under the border fence until after last summer’s wet season. It usually takes a few years to establish itself. So far, the tendrils haven’t used their adhesive pads to climb the wood, so they might safely be left to compete with the downy chess grass, wild lettuce, and horseweed that grow along that section of driveway.
The only problem with birds as the agent for diffusion is that before there can be seed to drop, there must be flowers. Like other members of the grape family, Virginia creeper’s green floral clusters are so small they wouldn’t be seen from the road and the purple berries are too dark. So it means nothing to say I’ve never seen them blooming. However, Iverson’s team says they don’t flower often, at least in Illinois, and Grey-Wilson warns his vines only fruit during hot summers in Britain.
That leaves a puzzlement. Along the main road, the places with dense colonies of vines are too far apart to be spreading from a single plant, and neither far enough nor close enough for birds. The only alternative is that once a plant is established it roots its own branches, which may grow twenty feet a year, and expands on its own momentum. Then, when it does produce fruit, a bird can move it another thousand feet down the fence or across the road.
It’s persistence and spread may be a bit of a riddle, but nature is unfaed. Most of the year, Virginia creeper blends with other vegetation, dark green leaves in summer, dead leaves in fall, bare branches in winter. For just a brief spell, ended this year by last Monday’s cold, nature shows off when the five-part leaves turn burgundy and reveal their profligacy.
Notes:
Grey-Wilson, Christopher. Gardening on Walls, 1982, cited by Ken Fern, Plants for a Future Database, available on-line.
Iverson, Louis. Illinois Plaint Information Network, with data compiled by David Ketzner and Jeanne Karnes; available on-line.
University of New Mexico herbarium. Institute of Natural Resource Analysis and Management on-line database.
Van Clef, Michael and Edmund W. Stiles. "Seed Longevity in Three Pairs of Native and Non-native Congeners: Assessing Invasive Potential," Northeastern Naturalist, 8:301-310:2001.
Zhang, Z.J., L. Shi, J.Z. Zhang and C.Y. Zhang. "Photosynthesis and Growth Responses of Parthenocissus quinquefolia (L.) Planch to Soil Water Availability," Photosynthetica 42:87-92:2004.
Photograph: Virginia creeper growing over a stone wall near the orchards and climbing into the apple trees behind; dried pigweed in front; 20 October 2006.
What’s blooming in the area: Roses, Heavenly Blue morning glory, narrow leaf globemallow, white sweet clover, chamisa, winterfat, Tahokia daisy, Maximilian and native sunflowers, áñil del muerto, broom senecio, gumweed; golden, strap leaf and purple asters; cottonwoods turning yellow by the river; horses in to pasture.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Chocolate flower, blanket flower, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.
Looking east: Sweet alyssum, winecup, hollyhock, larkspur, California poppies, Crackerjack marigolds.
Looking south: Rugosa rose.
Looking west: Catmint, purple ice plant.
Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: Quail still harvesting the yard; grasshoppers, ants, black widow spider, ladybug on saltbush; Juara, the runaway cat, is still well-fed and living under my neighbor’s abandoned truck.
Weather: Windy evenings and cold mornings; last rain, 29 September.
Weekly update: It’s so easy to impute modern life in Rio Arriba county to its Spanish heritage and very difficult to identify the deeper strands of influence without falling into the snares of romanticism or stereotype.
Oñate arrived in our valley in 1598, hunting for gold, and found people who’d been farming along the river confluences for several hundred years. A generation later, Alonso de Benevides saw water for irrigation, piñon for fuel and food, adobe for building, and Spanish settlers on the best lands in 1630.
When Zebulon Pike explored the upper Rio Grande in 1807, he didn’t see enough wood to support a moderate population for 15 years He thought they would be reduced to mudbrick houses and have to settle for "cattle, horses, sheep and goats" rather than crops. He labeled the plains an "internal desert" and people stayed away until artesian wells were introduced.
What separated the two military scouts were the expectations that come with time. Seventeenth century colonists still accepted contact with Spain every three years. Nineteenth century Americans no longer tolerated rivers that weren’t navigable enough to ship crops to market.
The Franciscans saw Tewa speaking pueblos they thought could be turned into farm hands like the Moriscos in southern Spain. Americans met mobile Indians who’d had the horse for many of those intervening 177 years and weren’t about to labor for them.
The natives of arid Spain knew how to live with less than 20" of rain a year, the easterners did not. Landscape and experience influenced how each saw the possibilities of New Mexico.
The expectations of snapdragons are easier to meet. They like cool weather and limestone soil. Mine usually stop blooming in the summer and resume with better flowers in the fall after they’ve grown more leaves. Most years, a few perennials survive the winter to grow, if not bloom, the following summer. Several have gone to seed and reappeared closer to water.
This year the Bells, Sonnets, and Rockets stayed in bloom until August when the monsoons failed, and resumed flowering the middle of September when water returned to the area. When last summer stayed wet and cool, Sonnets and Rockets bloomed until mid-September, then stopped for the year.
Weather is the hidden link to Spain. Back when the earth was covered by jungle in the middle Eocene, 38 to 54 million years ago, a drier area developed outward from the modern Mediterranean. The traditional snapdragon family, Scrophulariaceae, evolved to the west in the Mandran.
When the modern distribution of climates emerged some five million years ago, Antirrhinum developed in the relicts of that Mandran-Tythan band, in modern California and Iberia. The continents had long been separated, so parallel developments could only have resulted from similar genetic responses to changing conditions by species with common ancestors.
My snapdragons may be derived from Spain’s purple Antirrhinum majus that have been bred for color, habit and resistance to fungus, but they aren’t popular here because they came with the conquistadores. The bedding plants are bought as soon as they appear in stores in April because people have had good luck with them and they like the bright complex flower spikes.
An accumulation of experiences has formed both our expectations for a good flower and the snapdragon’s ability to survive our harsh summers. It’s more than wondrous coincidence that both the buyers and the flowers come from Spain, but not an inevitable consequence of shared national heritage. Landscape still matters.
Notes:
Axelrod, Daniel I. "Evolution and Biogeography of Madrean-Tethyan Sclerophyll Vegetation, "Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden, 62:280-334:1975.
Benavides, Alonso de. Memorial que fray Juan de Santaner de la orden de S. Francisco presenta a la Magestad Catolica del Rey don Felipe Quarto, 1630, republished 1996 as A Harvest of Reluctant Souls, translated and edited by Baker H. Morrow.
Gübitz, Thomas, Ailsa Caldwell, and Andrew Hudson. "Rapid Molecular Evolution of Cycloidea-like Genes in Antirrhinum and Its Relatives," Molecular Biology and Evolution 20:1537-1544:2003.
Pike, Zebulon. Quoted by Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains, 1931.
Photograph: Snapdragon with seed stalks, 20 October 2007.
What’s blooming in the area: Roses, silver lace vine, buddleia, datura, Heavenly Blue morning glory, rose of Sharon, narrow leaf globemallow, white sweet clover, chamisa, broom snakeweed, winterfat, Tahokia daisy, Maximilian and native sunflowers, áñil del muerto, ragweed, broom senecio; golden, heath, strapleaf and purple asters; milkweed leaves turning yellow.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Golden spur columbine, chocolate flower, blanket flower, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, yellow cosmos, chrysanthemum; rose hips.
Looking east: Pinks, sweet alyssum, sidalcea, winecup, hollyhock, California poppies, Crackerjack marigolds.
Looking south: Rugosa rose, Crimson Rambler morning glory, Sensation cosmos, zinnia
Looking west: Russian sage, catmint, purple ice plant; leadplant leaves turned red, lily leaves turning yellow
Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium
Animal sightings: Quail, grasshoppers, ants; gopher active; goats in empty field down the road.
Weather: Cold temperatures destroyed grape and zinnia leaves, but zinnias are still blooming; winds continued to scatter seed. Last rain, 9/29/07.
Weekly update: Plants that went into remission in the summer heat and drought are blooming again. The rugosa rose, pinks, and snapdragons do this every year, but it’s not routine for my cutleaf coneflower.
I’m not sure what is normal for it, since it shouldn’t grow here at all. Rudbeckia laciniata prefers stream banks and forest edges, and can’t tolerate drought. My rhizomatous plant must depend on water in the soil rather than atmosphere, since the one is fairly constant here, and the other changes every year.
This particular composite, with its distinctive young green cone, does occur naturally in Rio Arriba county. Standley saw it along the Brazos river north of Tierra Amarilla in 1911. It’s since been spotted along the Rio Vallecitas in Carson National Forest. Both are at much higher elevations than Española.
Even with its seeming obscurity, Curtin found Spanish speakers in northern New Mexico who knew dormilón well enough to tell her they used its leaves to treat gonorrhea and "female trouble" in the late 1940's. More recently, Moore heard it used for late periods as well as uterine and vaginal problems.
The basal rosette of deeply lobed leaves arrived in my yard by chance. I ordered Maximilian sunflowers from an Iowa nursery in 1999, and this was shipped instead. Since it’s not something Henry Field offers, I don’t know if it was a local volunteer, stowed there in some seed, or crowded out a potted plant it bought elsewhere for resale.
My plant normally starts producing clusters of yellow flowers on 5' stalks the end of July and stops five weeks later. Why it’s reblooming now on lower branches when the leaves are already turning yellow is as big a mystery as how it survives this arid environment.
Botanists believe the leaves that produce a plant’s food through photosynthesis control its blooming schedule by sending messages to the cell production center in the central stem when they detect the species specific necessary hours of darkness. That would help explain why the late spring and early summer plants are reblooming, but not this late summer plant.
Perhaps the failure of the monsoons disrupted the cycle of this water loving perennial and stopped the growth of some stems in August. When it finally rained, those inactive stalks may have resumed growth and now are mature enough to send urgent signals to their meristems to convert to reproduction as quickly as possible.
Its taken botanists some seventy years to establish the little they now about flowering cycles. Why should a stray cutleaf coneflower let the most recent theories stop it from blooming when it needs to?
Notes:Curtin, L. S. M. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.Moore, Michael. Los Remedios: Traditional Herbal Remedies of the Southwest, 1990.New Mexico State University. "Vallecitas Mountain Refuge, Tusas Mountains, Rio Arriba County, New Mexico," 2004, available o.Standley, Paul C. "The Ferns of Brazos Canyon, New Mexico," Amen-linerican Fern Journal 4:109-114:1914.Zeevaart Jan A. D. "Florigen Coming of Age after 70 Years," The Plant Cell 18:1783-1789:2006.
Photograph: Cutleaf coneflower with bud, young flower with green cone and older bloom with disc flowers, 13 October 2007.
What’s blooming in the area: Roses, Apache plume, silver lace vine, buddleia, canna, datura, Heavenly Blue morning glory, rose of Sharon, narrow leaf globemallow, white sweet clover, yellow evening primrose, pigweed, chamisa, broom snakeweed, winterfat, Tahokia daisy, Maximilian and native sunflowers, áñil del muerto, ragweed, broom senecio; golden, heath, strapleaf and purple asters; black grama grass; red peppers visible from road; baled hay left to dry in field.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Golden spur columbine, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, yellow cosmos, chrysanthemum.
Looking east: Pinks, sweet alyssum, sidalcea, winecup, hollyhock, California poppies, Crackerjack marigolds.
Looking south: Rugosa rose, Crimson Rambler morning glory, Sensation cosmos, zinnia.
Looking west: Russian sage, catmint, ladybells, purple ice plant.
Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium
Animal sightings: Quail, ants, bees, grasshopper, flies.
Weather: Rain Monday and Thursday night; windy all day Saturday; ice on my windshield Wednesday morning. Weekly update: Temperatures fell some mornings this past week, and plants responded. Catalpa, locust, and cottonwood leaves began to yellow. More Virginia creeper turned red. My nasturtium, which had only begun blooming with the rain on the 27th, went dormant again.
Last year the dwarf Jewel bloomed from August 22 to October 20. The large, furrowed seeds were planted the same time both years, the second week in May, but this year’s plants emerged May 25, two weeks before last year’s June 13.
When dates vary so widely, I suspect plants are sensitive to environmental conditions. Garden manuals advise the annuals like cool weather, but assume moisture is available. Since the plants were on the same irrigation regimen both years, the failure of the monsoons in August and the lack of atmospheric moisture must have been critical.
Their ancestral homeland is Perú, but by the time the Spanish arrived, tajsa had spread to south central México where it was eaten. In Perú they used the leaves for recuperative baths and to treat scabs. Nicolas Monardes was the first European to describe flor de la sangre in 1569 when he reported the leaves worked on fresh wounds. We now know the genus contains tropaeolum, a mustard oil that has antiviral, antifungal and antibacterial properties.
Monardes was a physician trained at a time when medical training at Alcalá de Henares still included botany. He worked for Phillip II and had interests in the drug and slave trade in Seville, the primary port for the Americas. He used his contacts to obtain seeds and information from returning sailors.
His seeds probably came from some place on the Caribbean coast, simply because Perú was still serviced by ships that went north to Panama once a year when the prevailing south wind was favorable. Cargo was transshipped across the isthmus. However, his medicinal information more likely came from someone returning from Perú.
Some believe Monardes was discussing Tropaeolum minus, the parent of my Jewel, and others that he was describing Tropaeolum major, the more common vining plant. Many believe the current varieties have resulted from so many crosses, species is no longer relevant, and use major for any nasturtium.
In Perú today, major grows wild on the hills above Ariquipa on the coastal side of the Andes at about 700' where goods from the interior were gathered for shipment to Lima before Cape Horn was discovered in 1616. It has naturalized along the south coast and in inland desert counties of California and currently is expanding its range in the Iberian peninsula, probably as minimum temperatures increase.
Whatever its pleasures where it is colonizing, here, in the rio arriba, nasturtiums survive on the frontier of the possible and respond accordingly.
Notes:
Calfora. "Tropaeolum majus L.," available on-line.
Cobo, Bernabe. History of the Inca Empire, 1653, quoted by Hipernatural.
Monardes, Nicolas. Dos libros, el uno que trata de todas las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales, que sirven al uso de la medicina, y el otro que trata de la piedra bezaar, y de la yerva escuerçonera, 1569, cited by many and quoted by Hipernatural.
Picó, Belén and Fernando Nuez. "Minor Crops of Mesoamerica in Early Sources (II). Herbs Used as Condiments," Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution 47:541-552:2000.
Sobrino Vesperinas, Eduardo, Alberto González Moreno, Mario Sanz Elorza, Elias Dana Sánchez, Daniel Sánchez Mata and Rosario Gavilán. "The Expansion of Thermophilic Plants in the Iberian Peninsula as a Sign of Climate Change" in Gian-Reto Walther, Conradin A. Burga and Peter J. Edwards, "Fingerprints" of Climate Change, 2001.
Van Wyk, Ben-erik and Michael Wink, Medicinal Plants of the World, 2004.
Weigend, M. and H. Forther. "Two New Species of Sisymbrium (Brassicaceae) from Coastal Peru," Brittonia, 51:119-123:1999.
Photograph: Jewel nasturtium with lance-leaf coreopsis seed heads and unwanted grass, 29 September 2007.
What’s blooming in the area: Roses, Apache plume, silver lace vine, buddleia, honeysuckle, canna, datura, Heavenly Blue morning glory, narrow leaf globemallow, white sweet clover, yellow evening primrose, lamb’s quarter, Russian thistle, pigweed, chamisa, broom snakeweed, winterfat, Tahokia daisy, Maximilian and native sunflowers, áñil del muerto, ragweed, gumweed, wild lettuce, broom senecio, golden, heath and purple asters; catalpa beans, hay cut.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Golden spur columbine, hartwegii, nasturtium, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, yellow cosmos, chrysanthemum.
Looking east: Fashion rose, garlic chives, pinks, rock rose, sweet alyssum, winecup, hollyhock, California poppies, Crackerjack marigolds. Looking south: Rose of Sharon, rugosa rose, Crimson Rambler morning glory, Sensation cosmos, zinnia.
Looking west: Caryopteris, Russian sage, catmint, leadplant, ladybells, purple ice plant, Monch aster.
Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: Quail, gecko, ants, bees.
Weather: Rain Sunday, Friday and yesterday, prairie wet deeper than my shovel; frost on car windows Thursday morning; low hanging, full moon before dark on Wednesday.
Weekly update: We finally got rain last week, and now the habitues of late summer have resumed growing, racing to produce seed before it gets too cold.
The rains began last Monday. Áñil del Muerto germinated last Saturday, and put out its second leaves two days ago. There was sun on Monday and Muhly ring grass showed some green that afternoon, as did the black grama and needle grasses. Downy chess grass sprouted in the drive.
Muhly is one of the grasses that colonizes land denuded by overgrazing. It’s palatable in early spring when it’s growing, but goes dormant in the heat of the summer and turns dry and harsh. When the monsoons appear, it regreens to send up short purple culms with seeds that are also unappetizing.
Not only is it well armed against herbivores, but it also adapts to scarce water. The perennial begins as a small round tuft. Over the years, the tuft turns into an inch or two greyish white wide band that expands outward, leaving an ever widening doughnut opening. When it greens up, it begins on the outer faces, where seeds form. In relatively flat areas, its new growth appears on all sides; on more sloping land ring muhly greens on the downhill or wet side first.
When I see it spread across the top of my south facing slope, I wonder if it prevents or abets erosion by stopping or channeling the flow of water. The recent rains have been able to sink into the ground, instead of rolling downhill. The ring, or its shadow, acts as a small reservoir where other seeds plant themselves and its shallow tenacious, fibrous roots hinder the wind.
The 2" high grass’s life cycle is heavily dependent on rainfall. During the droughts of the past few years, it all but died out, and snakeweed invaded its territory. With last year’s rains, it came back in the area where the needle grass had died, but didn’t try to resettle the area with the broom.
Frederic Clemens believed the order of succession on damaged arid lands was annual grasses, short perennial grasses, bunch grasses with ring muhly, and, finally, the original gramas. Others have since found grasslands rarely get beyond the needle and rice grasses, and that factors like weather and soil influence the progression.
Even if my uphill neighbor hadn’t told me he had worked for the ranch that owned this land before he settled on its perimeter, the mere presence of Muhlenbergia torreyi could have told me. I don’t know if it was cattle or sheep, but the remains of animal chutes near the old road bed don’t look wide enough for full-grown cows.
What I don’t understand is why it only appears on the upward side of my house, and why the lower land and much of the surrounding prairie are predominantly needle grass. I’m guessing there could be differences in the quality of the soil, or that area near the ranch perimeter may have been trampled more and the compacted soils less porous, less receptive to water.
It does appear the grass can’t compete with other vegetation, and that it dies out when either the bunch grasses or the scrub seed themselves. It also doesn’t like being crushed and cracks when it’s stepped on during its dormant phases. It would appear to be the first thing to disappear when humans or animals appear. While it seems common enough, in fact, in this area, its period of existence is limited by both humans and nature.
Notes:
Clements, Frederic E. Plant Succession and Indicators: A Definitive Edition of Plant Succession and Plant Indicators, 1928, discussed by Debra P. Coffin, William K. Lauenroth and Ingrid C. Burke, "Recovery of Vegetation in a Semiarid Grassland 53 Years after Disturbance," Ecological Applications, 6:538-555:1996.
United States Department of Agriculture, Forrest Service, Range Plant Handbook, 1937, republished by Dover Publications, 1988.
Photograph: Muhly ring grass, 29 September 2007.
What’s blooming in the area: Roses, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, buddleia, honeysuckle, canna, datura, bindweed, Heavenly Blue morning glory, cardinal climber, narrow leaf globemallow, white sweet clover, goat’s head, yellow and white evening primrose, purslane, Russian thistle, pigweed, broom snakeweed, winterfat, Tahokia daisy, French marigolds, Maximilian and native sunflowers, áñil del muerto, ragweed, gumweed, golden, heath and purple asters; piñon cones and juniper berries; grapes turning color.
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, Crackerjack marigolds.
Looking south: Rose of Sharon, rugosa rose, Crimson Rambler morning glory, Sensation cosmos, zinnia.
Looking west: Caryopteris, Russian sage, catmint, leadplant, ladybells, purple ice plant, Silver King artemisia.
Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: Small gecko, stink bugs, ants, bees, grasshoppers, miller moth; turkeys feeding in grass near orchards yesterday.
Weather: At last, some rain on Monday. The storm was severe when I drove through Pojoaque, but the skies were already blue when I got to my turnoff. Water still stood in gullies by the road, and water was flowing in the arroyos I crossed. The road was drying when I started up the rise to my house, but when I got to my drive, water was standing in tire tracks and I could hear the big arroyo running in back. The sun was shining, and a rainbow appeared to the north. When I walked out, even the ground in the bone dry prairie was soft enough to sink into. Storms remained in the area the rest of the week, releasing more water on Thursday and preventing evaporation the other days.
Weekly update: Larkspur is usually described as a hardy, cool season annual. That turns out to be a useful guideline for planting and planning, but doesn’t much explain why I have problems growing it.
Sunset’s garden manual suggests cool season annuals like cool soil and mild temperatures, but doesn’t hazard ideal temperatures. Stokes advises greenhouse owners to prechill larkspur seeds, plant them in soil 45-50 degrees and grow seedlings at 50-54 degreesConsolida, while HPS informs the same growers the optimal germination temperature is 60 degrees and the best growing temperature is 50 degrees.
Seymour told readers hardy plants were those that could be started outdoors, as distinct from a greenhouse or cold frame, and still have enough days to flower. However, he didn’t indicate the number of days required for larkspur, but did recommend planting in May for blooms all summer.
The reason writers may be hesitant to specify the number of days to bloom is that germination times vary from 8 to 15 days for Ann Reilly to a month for June Huston. Peter Loewer had success in 20 days with flowers 100 days after he planted seeds.
Larkspur apparently has not lost its evolutionary sensitivity to climate. Consolida ambigua née Delphinium ajacis are members of the buttercup family, one of the first flowering groups to emerge in the cretaceous age, after North America had separated from Eurasia and temperatures were dropping following the extinction of the dinosaurs some 50 million years ago. As climates continued to change, Ranunculaceae retreated north. Consolida apparently developed in southern Europe, probably in the cooler, mountainous regions of eastern Balkan places like Albania, Bulgaria, and Croatia, and Mediterranean islands like Crete.
Larkspur found its natural environment so favorable, it developed no adaptation strategy for bad years. The seed is only viable for one cycle, which means it must drop and bury itself, then hope winter snow melt fosters it. Wildseed claims 80% of its Rocket Larkspur will germinate; Stokes found its rate was between 74% and 76% in January. Viability declines rapidly after that.
Hot, dry New Mexico is obviously the wrong place for larkspur. I had no success until last year when I dropped Rosalie and Exquisite Rose seeds between perennials in the windy bed shaded by the retaining wall. The seeds I planted last May 20 bloomed from August 30 until killed by frost in late November. This year, I planted seed May 12 that put out its first flower August 29.
My two French grown tetraploids are the only varieties that have prospered here and probably only one of them is, in fact, blooming. I suspect, on the flimsiest of evidence, that it’s the Exquisite because I failed with Rosalie in 1999 and the other was being developed when seedsmen were still creating new offerings by multiple crosses with both Consolida ambigua and possibly other larkspurs. Paeonut found Exquisite Pink in a 1929 catalog.
Sometime, some person somewhere introduced some genetic factor that allows the one cultivar of a winter hungry wildflower to germinate in New Mexico’s late spring, then endure the summer heat to bloom when conditions change in late summer. Here, it turns out, cool season can mean either late spring or early fall.
Notes:
Horticultural Products and Services. Catalog.
Hutson, June and Brian Ward. Annual Gardening, 1995.
Loewer,Peter. Rodale’s Annual Garden, 1988, 1992 edition.
Paeonut. “Introduction Dates for some Annuals,” 2005, available on-line.
Reilly, Ann. Park’s Success with Seeds, 1978.
Seymour, E. L. D. The New Garden Encyclopedia, 1936, 1946 revision.
Stokes Seeds. Catalog.
Sunset. Western Garden Book, edited by Kathleen Norris Brenzel.
Wildseed Farms. Catalog.
Ziman, Svetlana N. and Carl S. Keener. “A Geographical Analysis of the Family Ranunculaceae,” Missouri Botanical Garden, Annals 76:1012-1049:1989.
Photograph: Larkspur, 22 September 2007.
What’s blooming in the area: Roses, silver lace vine, honeysuckle, canna, datura, silver-leaf nightshade, bindweed, Heavenly Blue morning glory, narrow leaf globemallow, white sweet clover, goat’s head, yellow and white evening primrose, purslane, Russian thistle, pigweed, broom snakeweed, chamisa, winterfat, Tahokia daisy, French marigolds, Maximilian and native sunflowers, áñil del muerto, ragweed, hawkweed, cocklebur, Hopi tea, gumweed, golden, heath and purple asters; apricots and unripe grape clusters visible, hay baled yesterday.
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: Hosta, garlic chives, large-leaf soapwort, sweet alyssum, winecup, hollyhock, sidalcea, larkspur, scarlet flax, California poppies, pink bachelor buttons, African marigolds, Italian white sunflowers.
Looking south: Rose of Sharon, rugosa rose, Crimson Rambler morning glory, 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.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: Quail, ladybug in Russian thistle, dragonfly, white butterfly on Tahokia daisy, grasshoppers, ants, bees; gopher leaving mounds.
Weather: Another week of promises, but no lasting rain; last wet ground, September 2, last real rain, August 8.
Weekly update: A week or so ago, The New York Times reported yet more genetic problems have evolved from this area’s isolation between Oñate’s entrada and the advent of the national labs. This time it was drooping eyelids caused by oculopharyngeal muscular dystrophy, probably inherited from a wandering French Canadian trapper, and headaches or seizures caused by cavernous angioma.
Our wild sunflowers blooming everywhere right now can also develop genetic idiosyncracies in isolation. All the flowers along the road and filling fields are a uniform, bright yellow. In my yard, many are darker gold, and a few are motley mixes. The difference is the feral plants mate with one another, while I throw down some purchased seed each year.
These two tendencies, the development of isolated populations and the openness to interbreeding have been instrumental in the development of the sunflower as a commercial crop. The cultivated large seed, single stalk plant diverged from the multiple branched one more than 4000 years ago in North America to become a separate subspecies, macrocarpus.
The Spanish took seeds back to Madrid where they spread through Europe. Peter I introduced them to Russia from Holland, and men like Andrey Bolotov, estate manager to Catherine I in the 1700's, found ways to extract oil. A century later, Russian Mammoth was developed, then exported back to the United States in 1893.
Agribusiness only became interested in hybrids when Americans became concerned about saturated fats, cholesterol, and heart problems, but their model for seed development required plants that did not exist. With corn, they removed the male tassels and fertilized the plants with other pollen. They often used pollen from the original plant to reintroduce fertility into the next generation. The composite disks of sunflowers, with both male and female organs, were too small to manipulate.
In 1969, Patrice Leclercq found a species of sunflower, Helianthus petiolaris, with naturally sterile cytoplasm that would combine with annuus. Soon after, Harry Kinman found the gene to restore fertility. Agricultural suppliers began improving farmer’s seed, and geneticists began testing the inherent dangers of that single prairie sunflower father.
Sunflowers for ordinary gardeners remained untouched. In 1987, when Yasuo Gato bought Vincent Van Gogh’s Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers, Thompson and Morgan offered a smaller range of varieties than it had in 1955: one seed plant, Russian Giant, instead of four; one species, Italian White, in place of six; one semi-double, Piccolo; one dwarf, Sahin’s Teddy Bear, one branched sunflower with multicolored flowers, Ernst Benary’s Autumn Beauty, and one with yellow flowers, Sunburst.
People who couldn’t afford $400,000 for a painting and couldn’t summer in Provence, suddenly aspired to the life of Van Gogh and opted for sunflower arrangements. Only things hadn’t change since he rushed to finish work each day by noon before his flowers wilted.
Companies scrambled to produce seeds for the cut flower industry. For them, male sterility meant more than the possibility of a commercial hybrid. It meant little or no pollen to soil table cloths or annoy allergic guests, it meant no heavy oil bearing seeds to bend stems, it meant flowers that had no reason to die.
A number of new branching plants were offered in 1991, but the magic words "little pollen" and F1 did not appear in an American retail catalog until 1994 when Park offered Sakata’s Sunbeam. From the next year on, at least three new varieties have appeared a year as breeders have worked to shorten time to flowering, make them grow in any season, have more disciplined stems, longer vase lives, and more varied colors.
Here in the valley, we don’t think of cutting the flowers; we know them, and their bees, too well from the drive. Instead, we eat them. At least four people this year are growing the traditional Russian plant, but only one other person has colored sunflowers. Meantime, inexorably, the laws of genetics are working each time two pure natives cross-pollinate with the chance some recessive genetic equivalent to drooping eyelid will take hold and spread through the ditches and roadsides.
Notes:
Crites, Gary D. "Domesticated Sunflower in Fifth Millennium B.P. Temporal Context: New Evidence from Middle Tennessee." American Antiquity 58:146–148:1993.
Daitz, Ben. "Heirs to a Rare Legacy in New Mexico," The New York Times, 4 September 2007.
Heiser, Charles Junior. The Sunflower, 1976.
Van Gogh, Vincent. Letter to his brother, Theo, 21 August 1888.
Zhukovsky, P. M. 1964. Kul’turnye Rasteniia i Ikh Sorodichi, 1950; translated by P. S. Hudson as Cultivated Plants and Their Relatives, 1962; cited by Heiser.
Photograph: Three native sunflower plants, three flower colors; 9 September 2007.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What’s blooming in the area: Roses, white sweet clover, pink evening primrose, winterfat, chamisa, snakeweed, áñil del muerto, golden and purple asters.
