What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses in town, white sweet clover, purple asters; dead leaves on catalpa and some cottonwoods, others still yellow.
What’s blooming in my garden: California poppy, Mexican hat, chrysanthemum, chocolate flower near house; peach, rose of Sharon, Siberian pea and caryopteris dropping leaves; cold killed leaves on apricot, black locust, weigela, cutleaf coneflower, Maximilian sunflowers; leaves beginning to yellow on Apache plume, flax, sea lavender, some iris; leaves turning red on pink evening primrose.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium
Animal sightings: Rabbit reconnoitering last Sunday.
Weather: Temperature fell to mid-20's on Thursday and low 30's Friday and Saturday. Last rain, 10/14/2008; 10:15 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: It’s not that I didn’t know. Milaeger was quite open when it said Silver King artemisia "will spread very quickly." A few years later they modified that to "rampant grower."
But sometimes that’s what you want - dense foliage that will quickly and cheaply fill an area where other plants won’t grow. I don’t remember now where I put the disc-flowered composite in Oakland County in 1986, but I do know it didn’t do particularly well. Michigan may be the only state in the country where Artemisia ludoviciana is considered a threatened species.
But that was there.
I didn’t deliberately bring the grey-leaved perennial to New Mexico. A piece of rhizomatous root stuck in a pot with something else in 1991, and emerged the next summer in my holding bed. I moved the survivor to the northwest side of the house in 1997 where it formed a colony the next summer. Not only did it begin to spread, but it hitchhiked again when I move a white yarrow, The Pearl, from there to the northwest side of the garage in April of 1998.
Now both beds would be overrun if I let them. It turns out, Silver King is a common name for the albula strain of the mexicana subspecies that’s native to the arid southwest from Colorado-Utah-Nevada south into México. Here it stays in range of the hoses and prefers the shelter of buildings, and so doesn’t follow the water into more exposed, sunnier areas.
The ancestral mexicana grows in the central highlands of México above 5,500' where it has been used medicinally by both the Aztec and the Spanish. In the Chiricahua mountains of southeastern Arizona, it prefers the canyons and limestone soils. George Osterhout found a variant, silvicola, with larger heads in Colorado that stayed along the northern streams, much like my cultivated variety.
So far I’ve let the mexicana albula grow at the outer edges of the beds, hoping the height, usually 18" to 24" by August, would shelter the more desirable plants during the summer heat and winds. The roots are fairly shallow, so they don’t compete directly with the nearby deeper rooted perennials. While the rhizomes haven’t gotten too dense, the multiple shoots with their flower bearing branches will crowd out the phlox and coneflowers. I have to spend at least one day a year, and sometimes more, keeping it to the periphery.
Sometimes I wonder why I’m so generous, but I know the reason’s aesthetic. Silver King has insignificant flowers that recently have been turning to seeds, but the herbaceous foliage is a good contrast with the blue flowers by the house and the phlox and lilies by the Navajo white garage where it grows out to the equally gray winterfat. More than Vita Sackville-West have enjoyed a garden limited to shades of white.
Invasiveness is in the eye of the overrun. In most parts of the country, proscribed plants are introduced aliens like kudzu or Siberian elms that do better than expected and escape into the wild. My most aggressive plants are natives to the region that don’t grow in this particularly hostile area, but are well adapted to flourish once those barriers are accidentally removed.
Notes: Bennett, Peter S., E. Roy Johnson and Michael R. Kunzmann. An Annotated List of Vascular Plants of the Chiricahua Mountains, 1996, available on-line.Heinrich, Michael. "Ethnobotany, Phytochemistry, and Biological/Pharmacological Activities of
Artemisia ludoviciana ssp. mexicana (Estafiate)" in Colin W. Wright, Artemisia, 2002.Milaeger Gardens, The Perennial Wishbook catalogs, 1987, 1993.Osterhout, George E. Included in John Merle Coulter and Aven Nelson. New Manual of Botany of the Central Rocky Mountains (Vascular Plants), 1909.
Photograph: Silver King artemisia, 19 September 2008.
What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, datura, gladiola, white sweet clover, chamisa, broom senecio, purple asters; cottonwood and milkweed turning yellow, cherries deep red, most Virginia creeper and grape leaves dead.
What’s blooming in my garden: Russian sage, California poppy, hollyhock, winecup, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, chrysanthemum, Sensation cosmos; leadplant leaves red.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, protected French marigold and gazania.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: Green bellied sparrow-like birds in Maximilian seed heads.
Weather: Temperatures were near freezing Monday morning before rains came through on Tuesday, followed by heavy fog on Wednesday and frost everywhere Friday morning. 10:35 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Chamisa is an iconic shrub for Santa Fe’s southwestern romantics. In the late 1940's, Leonora Curtin said it "recalls instantly the all-pervading sense of beauty that one attaches to New Mexico in the early autumn" and that "nothing so characterizes the landscape."
Oddly, while I see it along the road as I drive down the thousand feet from the city, the only place it grows in a dense stand here is the waste land where the Santa Cruz, running from Chimayó and Truches, drains into the Rio Grande. I don’t see it disrupting the prairie grasslands or scrub, nor do I glimpse it amongst the distant juniper.
Like many totemic plants the woody composite is more a keepsake of man’s life on the land than a relic of untouched wilderness. Chrysothamnus is native to the west from northern Mexico to the plains of southern Canada. Sparse nauseosus specimens have lived in such isolation from one another, the species has developed at least 26 recognized varieties that themselves vary so much from location to location that men trying to grow it for its vulcanizable latex during the world wars couldn’t find a single population that was reliable enough from season to season to cultivate.
Our graveolens subspecies thrives along arroyos and alkaline flats in open, sunny areas where its deep taproots can burrow until it locates water. Down the road, a few rabbitbrushes grow some twenty feet above a deep arroyo carved by an acequia that spills water much of the summer.
Another colony is settling the arroyo a half mile south where seed from the self-fertile tubular yellow disc flowers was blown or washed. The shrubs stay in the wet, sandy bottomland where they are creating islands in soil the transitory flowing waters can’t wash away. The contours were especially sharp last Sunday before the afternoon winds had a chance to erase the new erosion from night’s rains.
Ranchers found little use for the narrow-leaved shrub because the latex makes it unpalatable. A decrease in chemicals and an increase in protein make the herbage more edible when temperatures drop in fall and winter and other food becomes unavailable, but not enough for them to encourage it on their lands the other side of the river. The fact rabbits nibble it is no recommendation.
Spanish-speaking settlers gave the fuzz-covered shrub the same name as saltbush and sagebrush, chamizo, a word for brushwood or charred wood, with pejorative connotations of cheapness and poverty. If it ever grew in the area, it’s long been cleared and kept cleared. Not everyone likes the flowers’ strong aroma and protein-rich pollen. The only plants in the village are widely spaced clumps edging a fallow field far from the chapel.
The pueblos didn’t find many more uses for nauseosus . The Zuni used the bigelovii subspecies for baskets, no doubt exploiting the rubber compounds in hakoha luptsine’s twigs. However, the Hopi called our graveolens hanoshivápi because the Tewa-speaking Hano, who abandoned this area after the reconquest, used it for firewood.
The high resin content makes the woody base and annual growth flammable. It not only burns easily in a wildfire but it’s one of the first plants to revive, either from recently buried seed or root buds. While there’s little competition, chamisa can dominate a disturbed area for thirty to fifty years, before it gives way to bunch grasses or conifers.
This past week, as I drove in and out of rain showers, I saw the aging flowers by the roadside and once again pondered the microclimates that control what can grow here, and the people in the pueblos, settlements and enclaves along the highway who decide what will be allowed to survive. Santa Fe sí, Española nada.
Notes: Chamisa does not appear in many on-line Spanish dictionaries. The one appearing under the Oxford imprint defines chamizo as a colloquial term for brushwood or charred log. SpanishDict associates chamizo with a thatched hovel, while Tomasino suggests the related verb, chamuscar, means both to sear and sell cheap.Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco. Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.Stevenson, Martha Coxe. The Zuni Indians, 1904, reprinted by The Rio Grande Press, Inc., 1985.
Photograph: Chamisa in an arroyo bottom, 12 October 2008, soon after some rain.
What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, gladiola, some kind of yucca, datura, Heavenly Blue morning glory, silver lace vine, mullein, white sweet clover, yellow evening primrose, alfilerillo, lamb’s quarter, chamisa, broom senecio, snakeweed peaked, wild lettuce, hawkweed, áñil del muerto, Hopi tea, gumweed, heath and purple asters, native sunflowers peaked; cottonwoods turning yellow by the river.
What’s blooming in my garden: Russian sage, catmint, golden spur columbine, large-leaf soapwort, California poppy, hollyhock, winecup, Jupiter’s beard, nasturtium, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, chrysanthemum, Sensation and yellow cosmos, perky Sue, African marigolds, Maximilian sunflowers peaked, zinnia; snowball leaves turning red, rose of Sharon leaves turning yellow.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon almost gone, sweet alyssum, moss rose, French marigold, gazania.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium, bougainvillea
Animal sightings: Flock of small green birds in Maximilian sunflowers last Sunday; insects disappearing.
Weather: Yesterday’s rain was more welcome than the winds; frost on the car windows Thursday morning; 10:54 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Garden writers warn you: if F1 hybrids go to seed, they don’t come true. I have a yellow snapdragon growing amongst my pink and rose hollyhocks to prove it. Not just yellow. The buds are magenta, the aging flowers bronzed peach. Almost anytime I see it, the short, bushy plant has competing colors.
Two years ago I planted six pink Sonnet, six pink Rocket, and six red Rocket plants 15 to 20 feet downwind from where this yellow wonder appeared a year ago near the base of a hollyhock that apparently protected the tender perennial during the winter. I don’t know which plant, or plant combination, sired the fledgling, but the likely parents were all F1's.
We’ve known the habits of hybrids since Gregor Mendel described the dynamics of variation in 1866: that for every trait, nature begins with two alleles, one dominant and one recessive, and they always appear in a ratio of 1 pure dominant, 1 pure recessive, and 2 mixed. Seedsmen use F1 to refer to crosses between lines that have been purified through six generations to ensure all the alleles for a given trait are the same, and the resulting hybrid is predictable. However, as soon as the protected offspring is fertilized it reverts to the 1A:2Aa:1a pattern.
What’s surprising is that it took so long, nearly a hundred years, for seedsmen to exploit that knowledge for Antirrhinum majus. Rocket was the first popular F1 introduced by Harris Seed in 1960 when it won six All-American selection awards. Burpee had the first F1 award winner in 1957 with its rose-colored Vanguard. Sakata’s Sonnet became available through Stokes in 1988.
At first, those like Mendel who tried to replicate Darwin’s findings worked with economically important plants that were easy to manipulate, like corn, or with the anomalies he identified, like snapdragons. At Michigan Agricultural College, William Beal described methods any farmer could use to produce hybrids in 1876. He alternated rows of two common corn varieties, southern dent and northern flint; then removed the tassels from one group, to ensure all the seed would have the same male-female cross. The resulting crop produced 21 to 51 percent more corn. My home county production in 1874 was nearly 39 bushels an acre.
By 1900, a number had observed patterns like Beal’s and were ready when Hugo De Vries publicized the monk’s work in Germany. A few months later, William Bateson translated his article into English for the Royal Horticultural Society. Both men addressed an international breeders conference in New York in 1902.
Botanists pursued the mechanisms for selection, the chromosome and gene. Those who wanted to know why a red and a white snapdragon always produced pink ones and why the dominant to recessive color hierarchy dictates magenta over yellow, crimson over bronze, and bronze over yellowish-bronze learned combinations of genes could control a trait. Erwin Baur was using Antirrhinum in 1907 when he discovered mutations could be unstable. Hans Sommer’s team established snapdragon genes could change places to create these unexpected variations in 1985.
Seedsmen preferred the simple and predictable, and continued to refine pure lines into selections. Sutton offered 67 snapdragon varieties in England in 1926. Thompson and Morgan listed 82 in 1955. Two were advertised as reselected, but none were described as hybrids.
Farmers stayed loyal to Beal’s methods long after Donald Jones produced inexpensive hybrid seed in 1918, because his double-crossed corn required maintaining four potentially patentable pure lines to produce the immediate parents of seed that couldn’t be saved. Economically pressed farmers didn’t want to become dependent on seed salesmen, especially when many of the early releases didn’t adapt to local conditions. It wasn’t until the reorganization of agriculture in the 1930's that hybrids were accepted. This year Michigan is expected to harvest 140 bushels an acre, more than three and a half times the 1874 yield.
By then, the demand for ornamental seeds was depressed and flower seed breeders were more interested in exploring the possibilities of chemically altering the fertilization process to keep all the genes from both parents. Instead of four possible outcomes for any given mating, there were sixteen. In 1938 Bernard Nebel and Mabel Ruttle established colchicine as the best catalyst; in 1942 they published research on sterility in tetrapolid snapdragons. David Burpee introduced his first variety in 1946; Thompson and Morgan offered three in 1955.
The market for ornamental seed in the lean years of the 1930's and 1940's was florists. It was the expansion of suburbs after the war that created new demand for cut flowers on plants that homeowners could grow. Fred Stratt turned to F1 crosses, but his employer, Harris Seed, couldn’t afford the labor-intensive fertilization control required to mass produce Rocket seed. They teamed up with PanAmerican who had begun producing its seed in low-cost Costa Rica in 1946.
And so finally, decades after Mendel and Beal and Jones had worked out the theory, method and incentives for producing a robust F1 hybrid, I can buy good snapdragons. But when I look at what happens if one actually thrives and goes native, I’m still left with the question every farmer has ever asked when faced with a piebald: "Whoever was your daddy?"
Notes:
Desai, Babasaheb B. Seeds Handbook: Biology, Production, Processing, and Storage, 2004, describes color hierarchy for breeders.Everts, L. H. County history for 1877 includes data from 1874 census on crop yields; errors in reporting are possible.Fitzgerald, Deborah. The Business of Breeding, 1990, traces the resistance to hybrids.Michigan Corn Growers Association. "Michigan Corn Crop Outlook is Favorable," 3 October 2008 press release.Paul, Diane B. and Barbara A. Kimmelman. "Mendel in America: Theory and Practice, 1900-1919," in Ronald Rainger, Keith R. Benson and Jane Maienschein, The American Development of Biology, 1988.Rice, Graham. "Antirrhinums (Snapdragons)," Garden Answers, April 1999, has information on Sutton’s.Zhang, Dongfen, Qiuying Yang, Weidong Bao, Yu Zhang, Bin Han, Yongbiao Xue, and Zhukuan Cheng. "Molecular Cytogenetic Characterization of the Antirrhinum majus Genome," Genetics 169: 325–335:2005, reviews history of genetic research with snapdragons.
Photograph: Two-year old second generation F1 snapdragon between showers, 11 October 2008.
What’s blooming in the area: Rose of Sharon, tea and miniature roses, some kind of yucca, buddleia, winterfat, datura, Heavenly Blue morning glory, bindweed, blue trumpets, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, ragtag bouncing Bess, mullein, white sweet clover, yellow and white evening primroses, alfilerillo, lamb’s quarter, amaranth, ragweed, goat’s head, chamisa, broom senecio, snakeweed, wild lettuce, horseweed, áñil del muerto peaked, Hopi tea, gumweed, hairy golden, heath and purple asters, native sunflowers peaked, cockle bur, sandbur.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Red hot poker, golden spur columbine, nasturtium, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, chrysanthemum, yellow cosmos, perky Sue.
Looking east: Large-leaf soapwort peaked, scarlet gilia, California poppy, squash, hollyhock, winecup, Jupiter’s beard, sweet alyssum from seed, African marigolds, Maximilian sunflowers, zinnia; ripe raspberries and tomatoes.
Looking south: Blaze roses, Sensation cosmos; rugosa rose hips red, edible grapes.
Looking west: Russian sage, catmint, Mönch aster peaked, Silver King artemisia.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, moss rose, French marigold, tomato.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium, bougainvillea.
Animal sightings: Bees, ants, few grasshoppers.
Weather: Soaking rain last night; nature continues to prepare for winter, plants are going out of bloom, leaves are beginning to turn color and a few are dropping. 11:22 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: A Roman Catholic community must have wine, and so, in the early years, stoneware jugs were sent to frontier missions every three years or so by ox-cart. Franciscans tried to become self-sufficient, but grapes are sensitive to climate and soil. Whatever seeds or cuttings they brought, only one prospered, a large, dark fruited one possibly related to the Sardinian Mónica.
The vines García de San Francisco planted in 1629 at Senecú, the first settlement north of the Jornada del Muerto, survived the destruction of the Piro pueblo by Apache in 1675. Cuttings were taken to El Paso by García when he moved there in 1659 and may have been sent to the larger northern missions like San Ildefonso before the pueblo revolt of 1680.
Juan de Torquemada reported Tewa speakers were using "mucha uba" in bread in 1723, 29 years after de Vargas reconquered the Black Mesa. Francisco Dominguez saw vines growing in Santa Cruz in 1776. More recently, Barbara Freire-Marreco found grapes cultivated by San Ildefonso in 1911, probably for raisins, while the Interior Department observed uvas to the north along the El Rito, the Chama below Abiquiú and the Rio Grande between Velarde and Dixon in the 1930's.
When I moved here in 1991, two people had vines, one group growing along a sturdy rail fence, the other spreading onto wires strung between posts in a field. A few years later someone living near the river put in a vineyard with sapling posts supporting each root and top wires spreading the tallest growth.
I never see their fruit which tends to be protected by large, hairy, scallop-edged leaves, so I don’t know their varieties. The local stores offer green, red and purple varieties, and more are available by mail. I bought one of each in 1998, with the expectation the purple Concord derived from the hardy Vitis labrusco grown in upstate New York would do well, and the zone 7 green Thompson seedless vinifera popularized by Armenian refugees would fail. Instead, a Ruby seedless survived, and this year produced its first edible fruit.
Harold Olmo began work with the vinifera hybrid in 1939 by crossing the popular, but essentially tasteless winter grape, Emperor, with a seedless hybrid developed by Alberto Pirovano from the Muscat of Alexandria and a seedless sultanina. Olmo selected a cultivar in 1950 for further development, and released Ruby in 1968 when it quickly became the late-season crop in the San Joaquin valley. It has been since eclipsed by imports from Chile.
A zone 7 vine is a poor choice for the Española valley, and has been replaced by Flame in the local hardware. Most springs my Ruby vine leafs out in late April or early May and is killed by frost. The replacement growth keeps the root alive by producing buds for the next season’s fruiting wood, but doesn’t usually flower.
This year the weather stayed cool and leaves didn’t appear until May 14. Ruby thrives in the hot summers of the San Joaquin: it needs at least 100 days with temperatures above 50 degrees and cool nights. Here, when I’ve had fruit develop, there wasn’t enough time for it to mature. In 2006, I found fruit August 20 that didn’t begin to turn until September 16. In 2007, it was September 22 before I saw color. This year, the fruit appeared earlier, around July 12, and I ate some last weekend, but the still forming green clusters haven’t a chance.
A strange season for the valley, this, but one simpático for an alien from California whose fruit not only was sweet and thin-skinned, but contained but the merest remains of seeds that had been aborted by some recessive genetic pattern unique to the sultana.
Notes:
Domínguez, Francisco Atansio. Republished 1956 as The Missions of New Mexico, 1776, translated and edited by Eleanor B. Adams and Angélico Chávez.
Torquemada, Juan de. De los Veinte í un Líbros Rítuales í Monarchia Indiana, 1723, cited by William Wilfred Robbins, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.
US Dept of Interior, Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975.
Photograph: Ruby seedless grapes, 28 September 2008.
What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, winterfat, datura, Heavenly Blue and ivy-leaf morning glories, cardinal climber, bindweed, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, bouncing Bess, bigleaf globemallows, mullein, white sweet clover, velvetweed, yellow and white evening primroses, alfilerillo, stickleaf, lamb’s quarter, pigweed, ragweed, broom senecio, snakeweed, wild lettuce, horseweed, áñil del muerto, Hopi tea, gumweed, spiny, hairy golden, heath and purple asters, tahokia daisy, native sunflowers, sandbur, redtop, black grama, barn and muhly ring grasses; skunk bush leaves turning yellow, corn stalks mostly brown.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Red hot poker, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartweig, nasturtium, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, coreopsis, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, chrysanthemum, yellow cosmos.
Looking east: Hosta, large-leaf soapwort, coral bells, scarlet gilia, California poppy, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, pink veronica, Jupiter’s beard, sweet alyssum from seed, African marigolds, Maximilian and garden sunflowers.
Looking south: Rose of Sharon, Blaze roses, Sensation cosmos; spirea leaves beginning to turn orange, grapes turning red.
Looking west: Buddleia, Russian and Rumanian sage, catmint, perennial four o’clock, David phlox, leadplant, purple ice plant, Mönch aster, Silver King artemisia; caryopteris leaves turning color.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, moss rose, tomato.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium, bougainvillea.
Animal sightings: Gecko, bees, ants, grasshoppers.
Weather: Allergies have been worse this year; after a few cool mornings, plants have begun their preparations for winter; heard rain on the roof a few nights, but saw no evidence on the ground in the mornings; last useful rain 8/31/08; 11:42 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Nursery catalogs give special prices when one orders at least three plants of the same type. This isn’t simply mass marketing, but an affirmation of recommendations from garden writers like Rosalie Doolittle who suggest "a better effect is obtained more quickly by planting in groups of three, five and seven" than by "stringing out single plants here and there."
The only time a functional reason is offered is with fruiting plants like holly or apples. The first bear flowers with male and female parts on separate plants, and so both types are needed if one expects berries. Apples are hermaphrodites, but the male pollen cannot fertilize the female ovary of the same plant or its clone. One has to plant different varieties that bloom at the same time to harvest more than flowers.
Experience suggests another reason. With short-lived perennials like scarlet gilia it’s cheaper to have plants reseed themselves, than replace them every few years. Ipomopsis aggregata is so ephemeral, it dies after blooming, even though it may remain a basal rosette for years. Few garden guides mention which plants are self-fertile, so buying groups is a defense against one’s own ignorance as well as the caprices of nature.
My first four self-sterile gilia from August of 1995 didn’t open until 1997, then some stayed in bloom from June 23 until September 15. The remaining plants died out after flowering in 1998, and nothing appeared in 1999. When I went shopping the following spring, only one plant was available. I found three more in 2001, and discovered a seedling in the wet area outside the brick edging. Nothing bloomed again until 2005.
By then I’d given up on plants and thought about seeds, only to find no reliable sources. Burpee offered "Ipomopsis Humminbird Mix" in 2005 that came with no species information and didn’t germinate. Wildseed offered a different annual, Ipomopsis rubra, which I tried in 2005 and 2006 with no luck, that is, until two plants opened this July and stayed in bloom for a couple weeks.
I have no idea the origin of this year’s plant. I recognized the gray leaves when I uncovered them the end of March because they remind me of starched doilies waiting for Thanksgiving candles. It was growing amongst some bunch grasses near a hose by a fence 25 feet from the last plants I’d grown and 10 feet east of the Burpee seeds.
The first flower opened near the top of a single green stem July 5. Since, flowers have opened down the stalk, then branches that diverged up from the sites of the earlier flowers have lengthened with new clusters of phlox-shaped flowers that flare open from long, thin tubes. The five reflexed petals and throat are mottled, but the buds and tubes are the pure red one sees from a distance.
I do know I won’t have anything next year, unless there is more long-lived seed buried somewhere waiting for the right conditions to germinate. Both bumblebees and hummingbirds may transfer pollen from the five yellow, club-headed stamens to the three coiled purple stigmas that extend beyond the flower face, but as soon as the plant recognizes the autogamous origin of the pollen, it sends signals to the ovary which degenerates when too little starch accumulates in the surrounding walls of the embryo sac.
Even though scarlet gilia is an intermontane native that grows in forest openings above 3500', I’ve never noticed any in the immediate area. Last weekend I saw the pale blue trumpets of the shorter Ipomopsis longiflorum growing in the sand between stickleafs on pueblo land, but they’re no reproductive help.
Self-incompatible individuals that aren’t available in commerce must fend for themselves if they’re ever to naturalize in my garden, be it in groups or random plants like those cousins near the arroyo. I won’t be fussy about the aesthetics if they aren’t.
Notes:
Doolittle, Rosalie. Southwest Gardening, 1967 revision.
Sage, Tammy L, Mary V Price and Nickolas M Waser. "Self-sterility in Ipomopsis aggregata (Polemoniaceae) Is Due to Prezygotic Ovule Degeneration,"American Journal of Botany 93:254-262:2006.
Photograph: Scarlet gilia with anthers and stigma, 21 September 2008.
What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, winterfat, datura, Heavenly Blue and ivy-leaf morning glories, cardinal climber, bindweed, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, bouncing Bess, bigleaf globemallows, mullein, sweet pea, yellow and white evening primroses, alfilerillo, stickleaf, lamb’s quarter, pigweed, ragweed, broom senecio, snakeweed, wild lettuce, goat’s beard, hawkweed, horseweed, African marigold, zinnia áñil del muerto, Hopi tea, gumweed, spiny, hairy golden, heath and purple asters, tahokia daisy, native sunflowers, sandbur, redtop, black grama, barn and muhly ring grasses; roadside mowed.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Red hot poker, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartweig, nasturtium, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, coreopsis, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, chrysanthemum, yellow cosmos.
Looking east: Hosta, crimson climber morning glory, large-leaf soapwort, coral bells, ipomopsis, California poppy, garlic chives, squash, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, pink salvia, pink veronica, Jupiter’s beard, sweet alyssum from seed, sedum, Maximilian and garden sunflowers; late raspberries.
Looking south: Rose of Sharon, Blaze and rugosa roses, Sensation cosmos.
Looking west: Buddleia, Russian and Rumanian sage, catmint, perennial four o’clock, David phlox, leadplant, purple ice plant, Mönch aster, Silver King artemisia; white spurge leaves turned yellow.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, moss rose, petunia, tomato, French marigold.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium, bougainvillea.
Animal sightings: Hummingbird, bees, ants, grasshoppers.
Weather: Usual cool mornings and warm afternoons; a little rain last night, first since 8/31/08; 12:12 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Each year, just when I’m cursing the man who once again has taken a blade to mow the roadside back into a haven for pigweed, ragweed and Russian thistle, nature surprises me.
Two years ago I noticed some pale yellow patches back from the shoulder when I returned home in mid-July. I could never find them in the morning, because the white buds only open mid-afternoon. All that remained when I drove to work were punctured ovaries; the petals I’d glimpsed were invisible litter waiting to blow with the first wind.
Finally I pulled over and discovered one of the most gorgeous flowers I’d ever seen: ten pale lemon petals cupped a tuft of darker stamens like a water-lily floating with its large round pads around the edges of the lake where I went to summer camp. These New Mexico lotuses stood above grey-green fertility cones on terminal stems spread across the surface of whitish-grey stemmed shrubs.
The exotic Mentzelia is the only Laosaceae genus found in this part of the world. Maximilian Weigend thinks the family evolved in the Huancambamba depression of the Peruvian Andes. John Schenk and Larry Hufford believe that divergence began in the late Cretaceous, some 58 to 92 million years ago, when South America was drifting away from Africa, and that most of the Mentzelia developed during the late Tertiary, 3 to 26 million years ago, just before the isthmus of Panama formed to link South America to this continent.
Mentzelia multiflora thrives in the arid west from Chihuahua and Sonora north to Colorado and Wyoming, often in gravel or sand washes and along roadsides below 7500'. The perennials can wrest nitrogen from the cyanobacteria encrusted soils of Arches National Park in southern Utah, and survive on volcanic pumice in the Jemez. Scattered colonies illuminated the monotonous snakeweed and golden hairy asters spread between the fences and road through San Ildefonso and Santa Clara land the other side of the river this past week.
I didn’t notice the late-summer benefaction until a cluster emerged behind the Russian thistles below a new volcanic rock wall a half mile from my house. Some since have migrated across the road, then washed down the shoulder towards an arroyo where, this year, a few have dug their taproots into the sandy bank. More have found their way upwind to the far shoulder leading into the arroyo on the other side of the road where they coexist with sparse grasses.
A much larger stand exists south of my house on Santa Clara lands that slope down to the brink of another, larger arroyo where few other plants can live in soil depleted of all but the heaviest sands. It’s possible the seeds from this arroyo hinterland blew north, but I suspect the masons brought some seeds with their materials.
Most of the time all anyone sees are narrow gray-green leaves, lobed and upturned like children’s hair clips. Since the leaves are rough and the undersides covered with hairs that attach themselves to pant legs, people learn to stay away. New rosettes of similarly rough and grey leaves even now are interspersed with the taller, blooming plants keeping any approach treacherous.
The Spanish called it pegapega, or sticky sticky, and some used the resin as a glue to repair old santos. Tewa and Keres speakers rubbed the leaves of pukae on the skins of young children learning to ride hold them in place. Only the Navajo thought well enough of ili ihi to use it for rituals.
Even though stickleaf exists for only a few hours a day, a few months of the year, the armed beauty is there for those foolish enough to wander about in the late afternoon sun. Even Willa Cather saved one from her visit to New Mexico in 1916.
Notes:
Belnap Jayne and Kimball T. Harper. "Influence of Cryptobiotic Soil Crusts on Elemental Content of Tissue of Two Desert Seed Plants," Arid Soil Research and Rehabilitation 9:107-115:1995.
Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, includes George R. Swank, The Ethnobotany of the Acoma and Laguna Indians, 1932; Francis H. Elmore, Ethnobotany of the Navajo, 1944; George M. Hocking, "Some Plant Materials Used Medicinally and Otherwise by the Navaho Indians in the Chaco Canyon, New Mexico," El Palacio 56:146-165:1956; Paul A. Vestal, The Ethnobotany of the Ramah Navaho, 1952; and Leland C. Wyman and Stuart K. Harris, The Ethnobotany of the Kayenta Navaho, 1951.
Ortiz y Pino III, Jose. Don Jose: The Last Patron, 1981.
Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.Rosowski, Susan J., Charles W. Mignon, Frederick M. Link, and Kari A. Ronning. "The Issue of Authority in a Scholarly Edition: Editing Cather," in Alexander Pettit, Textual Studies and the Common Reader: Essays on Editing Novels and Novelists, 2000. Margaret R. Bolick, the University of Nebraska museum botany curator, is the one who showed the authors Cather’s contribution to the herbarium.Schenk, John J. and Larry Hufford. "Age Estimates of Clade Diversification in Loasaceae," Botany Conference, 2003.Sivinski, Robert "Mentzelia springeri", 1999, with comments on Mentzelia multiflora in the Jemez.Weigend, Maximilian. "Additional Observations on the Biogeography of the Amotape-Huancabamba Zone in Northern Peru: Defining the South-Eastern Limits," Revista Peruana de Biología 11:127-134:2004.
Photograph: Stickleaf, 14 September 2008.
What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, winterfat, datura, Heavenly Blue and ivy-leaf morning glories, cardinal climber, bindweed, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, bouncing Bess, bigleaf globemallows, blue vervain, mullein, white sweet clover, sweet pea, velvetweed, yellow and white evening primroses, scarlet beeblossom, alfilerillo, tumble mustard, toothed spurge, stickleaf, lamb’s quarter, pigweed, amaranth, ragweed, goldenrod peaked, broom senecio, snakeweed, wild lettuce, horseweed, African marigold, áñil del muerto, Hopi tea, gumweed, spiny, hairy golden, heath and purple asters, tahokia daisy, fleabane native sunflowers, sandbur, redtop, black grama, barn and muhly ring grasses; Virginia creeper beginning to redden, fruit visible on prickly pear.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Red hot poker, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartweig, nasturtium, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, coreopsis, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, perky Sue, chrysanthemum, yellow cosmos.
Looking east: Hosta, crimson climber morning glory, large-leaf soapwort, coral bells, ipomopsis, California poppy, garlic chives peaked, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, pink salvia, pink veronica, pink evening primrose, Jupiter’s beard, sweet alyssum from seed, sedum darkening, Maximilian and garden sunflowers, cutleaf coneflower peaked, zinnias.
Looking south: Rose of Sharon, Blaze rose, tamarix, Sensation cosmos
Looking west: Buddleia, caryopteris, Russian and Rumanian sage, catmint, perennial four o’clock, David phlox, leadplant, purple ice plant, purple coneflower, Mönch aster, Silver King artemisia.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, moss rose, petunia, tomato, French marigold.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium, bougainvillea.
Animal sightings: Small moth, bees on sunflowers, ants, some grasshoppers, caterpillar.
Weather: Clouds but no rain, furnace came on yesterday morning; last rain, 8/31/08; 12:40 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Fall has come to finish a year when nothing arrived on time. Spring was cool, but the rains stopped in March. Plants that expected water budded but didn’t flower. Some that have great shows for a week or two, instead bloomed sporadically all season. The coral bells are still opening new florets.
The winds were delayed, but once they began in April, they never stopped. Plants that won’t tolerate strong buffeting went dormant. Annual seeds that came up stopped growing, and some, like the larkspur and bachelor buttons, simply disappeared.
When the rains arrived earlier than usual, the first part of July, the winds undid their ablutions. Sunflowers are only now in full bloom, three weeks later than last year. Black-eyed Susans and Mexican hats that usually are little more than ripening seed cones this time of year are still flowering.
Last week morning temperatures started falling into the 40's, and the African marigolds and tall red zinnias that finally had started to bud, may never bloom. The one cheerful iconoclast in this anachronistic mix of flowers and seed heads is the yellow cosmos that usually opens by the first of August. In the morning sun, some weeks later than usual, brilliant spots of orange lurk among the lower stems of summer natives where I dropped narrow brown seeds the end of May.
I discovered this central American composite when I lived in Michigan, where my first attempt with the Bright Lights cultivar in 1986 succeeded. Here it took several years before I realized the seeds would only germinate where my house provides shade from mid-afternoon and shelter from southern and western winds.
Cosmos sulphureus is native to southern México and Guatemala, but has spread as far north as Durango, as far south as Ecuador. Bernardino de Sahagún reported the Aztec were using xochipalli flowers for dye when the Spanish arrived. It came to this country as an ornamental, where it was reported wild in the pine lands west of Silver Palm in Dade County, Florida in 1916.
In its preferred homeland, yellow cosmos can grow into a seven-foot bush that blooms all year, but becomes seasonal when it moves beyond the tropics. To promote the zone 8 perennial as an annual, growers needed to modify its habits to bloom the first year. When Thompson and Morgan introduced the shorter, three foot Orange Flare in 1955, it still warned seed "should be sown early" to flower before frost. Now it takes about two and a half months for my Bright Lights to bloom.
By the 1980's, breeders were looking for shorter plants that could complement the ubiquitous French marigolds in suburban gardens. Thompson and Morgan promoted Sunny Red, bred by Sahin, Zaden, as "the first truly dwarf and compact form" in 1986. My first Bright Lights towered two feet above my California poppies, their bare branches extending like windmill sails. Here the hairy square stems only reach a foot.
When Bodger introduced Bright Lights, it described the introduction with its ragweed style leaves as "a bright mixture of yellow, gold, orange and red shades." Most of my flowers are pumpkin, a few the yellow of squash blossoms. In Oakland County, Michigan, with its different soils and weather, yellow dominated.
In a year when nothing can be forecast except uncertainty, its surprising and just a bit reassuring to have an annual follow its normal schedule, bloom the usual ten weeks from planting, even when the sowing was delayed by bad weather and winds, when drought and unexpected temperatures slowed its growth. Such constancy is the more endearing when I remember how much the same cultivar differs between southern Michigan and northern New Mexico, and how the species transforms itself when it migrates.
Notes:
Bodger. Catalog, 2008.
Sahagún, Bernardino de. Historia Universal de las Cosas de Nueva España, c.1577, translated as Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, Book XI - Earthly Things by Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson, 1963.
Sherff, Earl Edward. Revision of the Genus Cosmos, 1932.
Thompson and Morgan. Catalogs, 1955 and 1986.
Photograph: Bright Lights cosmos blooming with the remains of chocolate flowers, 13 September 2008.
What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, winterfat, buddleia, datura, Heavenly Blue and ivy-leaf morning glories, cardinal climber, bindweed, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, bigleaf and fernleaf globemallows, blue vervain, mullein, white and yellow sweet clover, alfalfa, sweet pea, velvetweed, yellow and white evening primroses, scarlet beeblossom, alfilerillo, purple mat flower, tumble mustard, goats head, toothed spurge, stickleaf, lamb’s quarter, pigweed, amaranth, ragweed, goldenrod, chamisa, broom senecio, snakewee, wild lettuce, horseweed, goats beard, hawkweed, African marigold, áñil del muerto, Hopi tea, gumweed, spiny, hairy golden, sand, heath and purple asters, tahokia daisy, fleabane native sunflowers, sandbur, redtop, black grama, barn and muhly ring grasses; some red apples and still green peppers visible from road.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Red hot poker, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartweig, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, coreopsis, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, perky Sue, chrysanthemum, yellow cosmos.
Looking east: Hosta, crimson climber morning glory, large-leaf soapwort, coral bells, ipomopsis, California poppy, garlic chives, squash, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, pink salvia, pink veronica, pink evening primrose, Jupiter’s beard, sweet alyssum from seed, sedum, Maximilian and garden sunflowers, cutleaf coneflower, zinnias from seed..
Looking south: Rose of Sharon, Blaze rose, tamarix, Illinois bundle flower, Sensation cosmos.
Looking west: Caryopteris, Russian and Rumanian sage, catmint, perennial four o’clock, flax, David phlox, leadplant, purple ice plant, purple coneflower, Mönch aster, Silver King artemisia.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, moss rose, petunia, tomato, Dahlberg daisy, French marigold, gazania.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium, bougainvillea.
Animal sightings: Cottontail, gecko, bees, flies, mosquitoes, ants, grasshoppers.
Weather: Rain last Sunday; cooler since storm blew through Tuesday; morning temperature fell to 44 Friday; afternoons still dry and warm; 13:18 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: When I was a child in Michigan, wildflowers were the endangered trillium and May apples my mother nurtured beside the house. When I lived in Chicago, my neighbor’s wildflowers were the ones that bloomed in the desert after the rains outside Phoenix.
In my yard here, wildflowers are far less reliable, much less stunning. Almost every year, something, a single white daisy, a tiny purple cross, perhaps a small tangerine flower with a watermelon center will come up somewhere for an afternoon in the dense, water-repelling shield that protects the prairie from erosion. It rarely appears a second time, and never in the same place.
Usually these ephemerals appear in spring. In 1997, a small white fleabane bloomed on May 22 to the west of the house. Four years later, in 2002, a single white daisy bloomed on the east side for one day, May 13. Last year, two composites bloomed on the west side near a snakeweed on May 26. This year, a small colony bloomed by the garage on June 8.
Now something unprecedented is happening - a single plant bloomed August 3 , and then that colony started blooming again August 23. Each day, by late morning a dozen white clumps tinged with lavender continue to open. Last weekend, they were joined in the muhly ring grass by one tangerine-colored flower that fell off by mid-afternoon and a purple mat.
My little daisy is not glamorous. It has the usual long narrow petals of a fleabane, but sparsely spaced around the golden center, with a ridged holding cup. By the time I find the plant, there are no basal leaves, only narrow leaves clasping the weak stem that branches from the base.
They behave like annuals: they germinate when they get enough water, although they could be quick growing perennials that can’t survive a dry spell. In the past, it must have been some little pocket between the bunch grasses that captured both the seed and moisture. This year, they’re in the spillway for water that seeps from a culvert under my drive that carries the rain from my neighbors’ garage roof to the catalpa.
I have no idea where the seed comes from. Fleabanes are composites that let the winds disburse their achenes far and wide. Some Erigeron varieties are famous for creating huge seed banks that come back after fire or some other disturbance. However, I’ve been here 16 years, a long time for surface sown seeds to remain dormant with merciless drying winds, and this is the first time so many have bloomed. Guessing from the prevailing winds, their parents lived somewhere to the south or west on unsettled pueblo land.
It’s probably impossible to know which fleabane I have. There are some 390 species in the genera, many hard to distinguish. Geyata Ajilvsgi says one likely short dryland species, the plains fleabane, goes through three phases in a season. In early spring, it has single flowers on barren stems rising from basal rosettes. Later in the summer, the original leaves die away to be replaced by narrow stems on stalks than have branched out. Still later, they fall under their weight and sprawl about the ground.
If variation weren’t enough, Guy Nesom says the plant, Erigeron modestus, is an early blooming perennial that behaves like an annual and easily breeds with cousins. The species contains "genes from E. flagellaris, E. tracyi, elements of E divergens, and the Mexican E. pubescens Kunth."
Simplicity and complexity at the same time is easier for nature to produce than for man to comprehend. Wildflowers here are neither tamable like my mother’s trillium nor predictable like my neighbor’s cacti. Instead, they remain elusive signs of a world beyond civilization nature occasionally lets us see, but soon removes, leaving the impassive, unadorned prairie and steppe.
Notes:
Ajilvsgi, Geyata. Wildflowers of Texas, 1984.
Nesom, Guy L. "162. Erigeron modestus A. Gray" in eFloras.org, Flora of North America.
Photograph: Fleabane, 9/6/08.
What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, winterfat, datura, Heavenly Blue and ivy-leaf morning glories, cardinal climber, bindweed, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, bigleaf globemallow, blue vervain, mullein, white sweet clover, velvetweed, yellow and white evening primroses, scarlet beeblossom, alfilerillo, goats head, toothed spurge, stickleaf, pigweed, lamb’s quarter, amaranth, ragweed, goldenrod, wild lettuce, horseweed, goats beard, hawkweed, African marigold, áñil del muerto, Hopi tea, gumweed, spiny, hairy golden, sand, heath and purple asters, tahokia daisy, farmers, plains and native sunflowers, corn, redtop, black grama, barn and muhly ring grasses; buds on skunkbush; bittersweet berries orange.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Red hot poker, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartweig, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, coreopsis, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, perky Sue, chrysanthemum, yellow cosmos.
Looking east: Hosta, crimson climber morning glory, large-leaf soapwort, coral bells, ipomopsis, California poppy, garlic chives, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, pink salvia, pink veronica, pink evening primrose, Jupiter’s beard, sweet alyssum from seed, sedum, Maximilian and garden sunflowers, cutleaf coneflower, zinnias from seed; hollyhock seed cases opening.
Looking south: Rose of Sharon, Blaze rose, tamarix, Illinois bundle flower, Sensation cosmos; lilac buds forming, grapes getting larger.
Looking west: Caryopteris, buddleia, Russian and Rumanian sage, catmint, perennial four o’clock, flax, David phlox, leadplant, purple ice plant, purple coneflower, Mönch aster.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, moss rose, Dahlberg daisy, French marigold, gazania.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium, bougainvillea; beginning to need less water.
Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, finch, ants, bees, fewer grasshoppers.
Weather: Rain last Sunday as Fay hit Florida for the fourth time; rain again Tuesday before Gustav formed in the Caribbean; temperatures remained cooler, ranging from mid-50's to middle 80's; 13:38 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: If it weren’t for Agatha Christie, I doubt I’d be growing asters.
Michaelmas daisies locate her mysteries by season or class and serve as unobtrusive signs for the nearness of violent death. They aren’t the ones neglected or passing, but stand in contrast to "unevenly mown" lawns and "straggling chrysanthemums." They are the "great banners of Autumn" in a "neglected garden," the "last dying splash of purple beauty."
I tried with little success to grow asters in Michigan, but few were actually Christie’s flowers. Botanists have now determined the DNA of north American plants like New York, New England, heath and purple asters is not close enough to the Europeans, and have moved them into a separate genera on composites, Symphyotrichum.
It was with some reluctance I bought any here, and I was greatly surprised when Dunkle Schöne and Mönch actually survived for more than a season. The first is an alpine aster offered by Ernst Benary that grew low and bloomed in May until the winter of 2003. The replacement plants failed, and I abandoned the species. After all, true Michaelmas daisies should bloom near that feast day, September 29, which the British use as a synecdoche for autumn.
I’ve had better luck with the taller, yellow-centered Mönch. The small plants I ordered in 1997 lasted until severe weather weakened them in 2001. The ones I bought locally in 2003 and 2005 died out, but the cuttings I planted in 2006 are now covered with large lavender flowers on knee high stems that should last until severe cold takes them in October or November.
Mönch is the product of that happier time evoked by Christie’s novels when racism and fundamentalism hadn’t yet converged to deny Darwin and the reverend Charles Wolley-Dod could take two species and see if they would interbreed. His crosses between Aster amellus and Aster thomsonii disappeared, but other hybrids of the two were introduced in the 1920's by Carl Frikart from a nursery in Stäfa on Lake Zurich.
The purple-flowered amellis grows from southern and eastern Europe into bordering Asia. Gertrude Jekyll, the garden designer most responsible for the herbaceous borders that imbue Christie’s backgrounds with their moods, used amellis "in rather large quantity, coming right to the front in some places, and running in and out between the clumps of other kinds" in her 1908 plan for a Michaelmas border.
The lavender-rayed thomsonii was discovered by Charles Baron Clarke in Kashmir in 1876, and sent back to England so Wolley-Dod could show his new hybrids in 1892. They too evoke those better times when the tribal Himalayas were new territory for the British Empire, when Murder in Mesopotamia did not suggest suicide bombers, but archaeological digs with Dame Agatha’s new husband, and when Death on the Nile was not a killer of local livestock but a honeymoon adventure.
It’s ironic that Frikart’s Mönch asters are the only specimens on an English estate garden I’ve ever been able to grow, especially since our New York aster is now commonly sold there as the Michaelmas. However, one of its ancestors did come from the mountains of India through a stay in the Alps of Switzerland, before landing in England where Penelope Hobhouse now recommends the south-facing Mönch in place of amellis in Jekyll inspired borders.
Notes:
Christie, Agatha. Cards on the Table, 1936, chrysanthemums.
_____. Death on the Nile, 1937.
_____. Evil Under the Sun, 1980, banners and neglected garden.
_____. Murder in Mesopotamia, 1936.
_____. Murder is Announced, 1950, dying splash.
_____. The Clocks, 1963, lawn.
Hobhouse, Penelope. Gertrude Jekyll on Gardening, 1983, compilation of writings by Jekyll with commentary by Hobhouse, including quotation from page 216.
Jekyll, Gertrude. Colour in the Flower Garden, 1908, reprinted by Elibron Classics, 2005.
Photograph: Mönch asters 30 August 2008.
What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, winterfat, datura, Heavenly Blue and ivy-leaf morning glories, bindweed, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, bigleaf globemallow, blue vervain, mullein, white sweet clover, sweet pea, velvetweed, yellow and white evening primrose, scarlet beeblossom, silverleaf nightshade, alfilerillo, goats head, toothed spurge, stickleaf, pigweed, amaranth, ragweed, goldenrod, wild lettuce, horseweed, goats beard, African marigold from seed, áñil del muerto, Hopi tea, gumweed, spiny and hairy golden aster, tahokia daisy, farmers, garden, plains and native sunflowers, cocklebur, sand bur, corn, redtop, barn and muhly ring grass; milkweed pods formed; buds on skunkbush; sweet corn for sale; both alfalfa and smooth brome hay being cut with whatever else was growing in the fields.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartweig, squash, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, coreopsis, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, perky Sue, chrysanthemum, yellow cosmos.
Looking east: Floribunda rose, hosta, crimson climber morning glory, large-leaf soapwort, coral bells, ipomopsis, California poppy, garlic chives, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, pink salvia, pink evening primrose, Jupiter’s beard, sweet alyssum from seed, sedum, Maximilian sunflower, cutleaf coneflower, zinnias from seed.
Looking south: Rose of Sharon, rugosa and Blaze roses, tamarix, Illinois bundle flower, Sensation cosmos.
Looking west: Caryopteris, buddleia, Russian and Rumanian sage, catmint, perennial four o’clock, flax, David phlox, leadplant, purple ice plant, white spurge, sea lavender, purple coneflower, Mönch aster; yucca seed pods splitting open.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, moss rose, Dahlberg daisy, French marigold, gazania, tomato.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium, bougainvillea.
Animal sightings: Gecko, hummingbirds in trees, monarch butterflies, bees, ladybug, brick red grasshopper, 50 some small black ant hills appeared outside my gate.
Weather: Rained several times last Sunday, near arroyo was running; morning temperatures since have fallen into upper 50's, but afternoons still reached upper 80's with wind. 13:48 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: My need to know what’s growing around me began with a woody vine exploiting the area between neighbors’ fences in Michigan. I cut it back on my side with no harm, then touched the arm of a friend and left a rash. It turned out to be poison ivy, not in the "three leaves with red stems sprawling on the ground" phase, but something more akin to wild grapes.
Now when I walk along the roadside, it’s not simply because I’m curious about what’s blooming. I want to know the barbarians at the gates in all their stages, so if an undesirable volunteers, I’ll recognize it before its roots get too deep to remove.
Luckily, Hopi tea wouldn’t be a nuisance, because its young definitely would be difficult to detect. The composite has stripped itself to the barest essentials, produces only disk flowers and the scantiest of curling, blue-grey leaves on wiry, one to two foot stems. The yellow flowers are closed by mid-morning, unless it’s cloudy. Most of the time, all I see are tightened petals darkened by rust-colored veins, empty brown sepals, and reddish seed capsules.
Thelesperma megapotamicum grows in the intermontane west and arid great plains as far north as Montana in this country and down through Chihuahua and Coahuila to Zacatecas. A tea made from dried plants is one of the few foods common to nearly every pueblo, from the Hopi in the west to the nearby Tewa-speaking Santa Clara, and many Keres speakers between, including the Cochiti, Santo Domingo, Laguna, and Acoma..
The mild, slightly astringent drink spread to the invading Navajo and Apache, where the first also used ch’il awhéhé root to dye wool a yellowish-orange. The Hopi used ho hoysi flowers to stain yucca fibers a reddish brown for baskets, and it’s been used as a colorante in northern Mexico.
When the Spanish arrived several centuries later they adopted cota, usually with sugar. In 1997, 91-year-old curanderismo Gabrielito Pino was still gathering the herb after August 12 in the Mora valley for stomach, kidney, and urinary problems because that day was "consecrated to the Blessed Virgin." In older eastern church traditions, Dormition, when Mary’s body was removed to heaven, followed her death on the 12th by three days and this midpoint between mid-summer and the fall equinox was marked by ceremonies blessing the herbs in Europe. The 15th, Assumption Day, is still a Laguna and Zia feast day.
Somehow this close relative of coreopsis found its way to Argentina, perhaps with the Spanish. There té indio is used for gonorrhea, kidney and nerve problems. Zoncho Tso has been told by relatives that some of their fellow Navajo have used it for the venereal disease. His mother also told him he should say a prayer when he gathered this, or any herb, explain why he was taking the plant from its home, and always leave some behind.
I think the only people who don’t appreciate greenthread live in Los Alamos where the national lab doesn’t want any vegetation over its landfills which could disturb what lies below. The Earth and Environmental Sciences Division found Hopi tea to be one of the first plants to colonize a conventional cover.
Here it stays to the shoulder, where its taproot can reach the water shed by the pavement and it co-exists with gumweed and pigweed. This year, the visible plants don’t grow in dense colonies, but are scattered. So far, the perennial has shown no interest in my land or any inland fields, clinging instead to the moister edges of civilization.
Notes:
Arellano, Anselm. "New Mexico’s Healing Tradition: Curanderismo Survives 400 Years," Herbs for Health 46-52:March/April 1997. Pius XII formalized the chronology in 1950 when he set Assumption day as August 15. Since the Roman Catholic Church repudiates the more corporal aspects of Mary’s life, her physical death is not recognized like it is in eastern and older folk traditions.Breshears, David D., John W. Nyhan, and David W. Davenport. "Ecohydrology Monitoring and Excavation of Semiarid Landfill Covers a Decade after Installation," Vadose Zone Journal 4:798-810:2005.Davicino, Roberto, María Aída Mattar, Yolanda Angelina Casali, Silvia Graciela Correa, Elisa Margarita Pettenati, and Blas Micalizzi. "Actividad Antifungica de Extractos de Plantas Usadas en Medicina Popular en Argentina," Revista Peruana Biología 14:247-251:2007.
Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, and on-line database.
Tso, Zoncho. "Thelesperma megapotamicum" website.
Photograph: Hopi Tea growing beside the road between storms last Sunday, 17 August 2008.
What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, winterfat, datura, bindweed, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, datura, Heavenly Blue and ivy-leaf morning glories, bigleaf globemallow, white sweet clover, velvetweed, yellow and white evening primrose, scarlet beeblossom, silverleaf nightshade, goats head, toothed spurge, portulaca, stickleaf, pigweed, zinnia, goldenrod, wild lettuce, horseweed, goats beard, Hopi tea, gumweed, spiny and hairy golden aster, tahokia daisy, farmers, garden and native sunflowers, cocklebur, sand bur, corn, sideoats grama, redtop, barn grass. Chickens let out in several hay fields after they were cut.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartweig, squash, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, coreopsis, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, perky Sue, chrysanthemum, yellow cosmos.
Looking east: Floribunda rose, hosta, large-leaf soapwort, pinks, coral bells, ipomopsis, California poppy, garlic chives, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, pink speedwell, pink salvia, pink evening primrose, Jupiter’s beard, sweet alyssum from seed, cutleaf coneflower; buds on sedum.
Looking south: Rose of Sharon, rugosa and Blaze roses, tamarix, Illinois bundle flower, Sensation cosmos.
Looking west: Caryopteris, buddleia, Russian sage, catmint, blue salvia, perennial four o’clock, flax, David phlox, leadplant, purple ice plant, white spurge, sea lavender, purple coneflower, Monch aster.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, moss rose, Dahlberg daisy, French marigold, gazania, tomato.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium, bougainvillea.
Animal sightings: Hummingbird, ants, grasshopper
Weather: Clouds hung around at night keeping early morning temperatures a bit warmer; dew Monday, rain pocked drive Thursday, hard rain before dawn Saturday and again last night; 14:05 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: My yard has spots filled with souvenirs from failed experiments based on faulty analogies. One is that succulents are like camels: since they store water, they don’t need much. I have an impressive list of sedums, sempervivums, and ice plants that proved that wrong.
Liberty Hyde Bailey knew better in 1930 when he said succulent only meant the green parts were thick and fleshy, nothing more. Indeed, he suggested, it was a mistake to think the roots could do without water for any length of time. The thick leaves might be an adaptation to an arid climate, but those environments have rainy seasons when these plants grow and expect water.
Still, I wasn’t the first. Early in the twentieth century, railroads planted various ice plants to stabilize the edges of track beds, including yellow-flowered Carpobrotus edulis and magenta-flowered Carpobrutus chilensis. Both naturalized in Mediterranean areas of California, even interbred, to cover banks with bright daisy-shaped flowers whose parentage is too mixed to identify.
James Raulston, raised in Oklahoma wheat lands still recovering from the dust bowl, saw chilensis, or some similar Aizoaceae, blooming in southern California in 1971, when he was about 31. Later, he photographed another ice plant, an unidentified purple Delosperma, in Wisely Gardens, Surrey, in 1984.
When the great migrations from the rust belt to the south and southwest began in the 1970's, they coincided with a drought that forced cities like Denver to restrict sprinkler use in 1977 and consider how it could survive with river allocation agreements written back when local economies were agricultural. The city’s water board began promoting xeriscaping in 1978.
Raulston moved to North Carolina State where he looked for non-native species that could grow efficiently in this country. He gave potted cuttings to nurserymen who attended his short courses, including the yellow-flowered Delosperma nubigenum in 1986. Four years later he promoted the magenta-petaled Delosperma cooperi with warnings that standard greenhouse practices like daily watering and constant fertilization weren’t as useful as benign neglect.
The next year, 1991, Santa Fe imposed water restrictions that forced greenhouse owners to make water-wise choices for themselves, if not their customers. Purple ice plant was in my first Santa Fe Greenhouse catalog in 1993. By 1997, when I bought my first cuttings, the ground cover first sent to Surrey by Thomas Cooper from modern day Lesotho in 1861 was being offered by all the major mail order suppliers.
Those first plants bought in August didn’t survive the winter, probably because they went from greenhouse conditions to hot New Mexico and weren’t able to develop good roots. I tried three more the following spring under a peach, where little seems to grow. They limped along after the cold winter of 2000 and disappeared the following year.
By then I’d planted three more cooperi under a Russian sage where they got extra water whenever hose washers needed replacing. In their native range, with wet summers and dry winters, they’re evergreen. Here the narrow, triangular leaves stay green here until November, then die to the ground leaving a maze of white, woody stalks.
They don’t much like standing water in winter, and were slow to emerge this spring. When new growth did appear in mid-May, several weeks later than usual, the thick stems were deep within the shrub and have shown little inclination to spread in the face of constant winds. The glistening flower petals have also been narrower. I don’t know if they can make it through the coming winter.
The lure of a completely new succulent that blooms from late morning to dusk all summer was too big a temptation for any of us. In Farmington, Daniel Smeal included cooperi in his xeric demonstration garden, and found it couldn’t survive when irrigation levels fell below 50% of transpiration. In El Paso, Genhua Niu and Denise Rodriguez hoped the perennial would do well with recycled water and found it lost body mass. Back at Raulston’s university, a graduate student, Amy Moran, tested plants for greenroofs and found purple ice plant one of the few to fail.
I suspect they all could tell their own version of the camel, the succulent, and the eye of a needle.
Notes:
Baily, Liberty Hyde and Ethel Zoe Bailey. Hortus, 1930.
Moran, Amy, Bill Hunt and Greg Jennings. "A North Carolina Field Study to Evaluate Greenroof Runoff Quantity, Runoff Quality, and Plant Growth," Greening Rooftops for Sustainable Communities Conference, 2004.
Niu, Genhua and Denise S. Rodriguez. "Relative Salt Tolerance of Selected Herbaceous Perennials and Groundcovers," Scientia Horticulturae 110:352-358:2006.
Raulston, James Chester. "J. C. Raulston's Slide Collection," available on-line.
_____. "Plants Distributed To Nurserymen - 1990 NCAN Summer Short Course," Friends of the Arboretum Newsletter (22)1991.
Smeal, Daniel, M. M. West, M. K. O'Neill, and R. N. Arnold. "A Differentially-Irrigated, Xeric Plant Demonstration Garden in Northwestern New Mexico," International Irrigation Show and Technical Conference, 2007.
Photograph: Purple ice plant under Russia sage, 13 August 2008.
What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, Apache plume, winterfat, datura, bindweed, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, datura, Heavenly Blue morning glory, bigleaf globemallow, white sweet clover, alfalfa, velvetweed, yellow evening primrose, scarlet beeblossom, goats head, toothed spurge, portulaca, stickleaf pigweed, zinnia, goldenrod, wild lettuce, horseweed, goats beard, Hopi tea, gumweed, spiny and hairy golden aster, May daisy, farmers, garden and native sunflowers, sand burs, corn, sideoats grama, redtop, barn grass; great piles of pulled pigweed waiting to be burned or hauled away.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartweig, nasturtium, squash, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, coreopsis, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, perky Sue, chrysanthemum.
Looking east: Floribunda rose, large-leaf soapwort, pinks, coral bells, ipomopsis, California poppy, garlic chives, hollyhock, winecup, pink speedwell, pink salvia, pink evening primrose, Jupiter’s beard, sweet alyssum from seed; buds on hosta, sedum, and cutleaf coneflower
Looking south: Rose of Sharon, rugosa and Blaze roses, tamarix, Illinois bundle flower, Sensation cosmos.
Looking west: Caryopteris, buddleia, Russian sage, catmint, blue salvia, perennial four o’clock, flax, David phlox, leadplant, purple ice plant, white spurge, sea lavender, purple coneflower, Monch aster.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, moss rose, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, French marigold, gazania; first tomato ripe.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: 4' long red snake about 1 ½" thick with a pattern that repeated every 3"; young birds chirping in peach, hummingbirds, noisy crickets, cabbage butterfly, garnet-colored dragonfly, bees, ants, grasshoppers.
Weather: Hot dry air before Edourdo spawned turbulent storms that eventually dropped rain on Wednesday and Thursday that left rivulets in my drive and collapsed the front bank of a neighbor’s yard; 14:36 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: There are plants, like four o’clocks, that enter cultivation, not because they’re beautiful, but because their external features match those of some familiar, already valued, plant.
When I tried Mirabilis jalapa in Michigan I was looking for older varieties that might grow when modern ones, altered for the bedding trade, simply wouldn’t. Catalogs described their habit of opening late in the afternoon when temperatures fell to attract moths with their sweet fragrance, and claimed they had been great favorites of Victorians like the Methodists who built my house. The seeds germinated into 2' plants with scattered flowers of pale colors that didn’t show or smell from a distance, but did drop seed to reproduce themselves.
I had less success here when I managed a few flowers a year between 1995 and 1997, then was lucky to get a flower every three years. By then breeders were releasing new varieties, and I turned to a native I’d heard was a hardy perennial. In fact, Mirabilis multiflora’s long funnel-shaped flowers are all pale magenta and it’s only good by itself. Each year the plant spreads to cover three to four feet then dries and breaks away, leaving a great bare area that can’t be touched until it reemerges in June lest the taproot be damaged.
Four o’clock’s success may always have come from the search for a replacement for something that no longer worked. After Hernando Cortez conquered the Aztec, he moved west to the mines of a subjugated tribe, the Purhépecha, whose leader was willing to become an ally against their shared enemy. Tangoxoán accepted the Franciscans in 1525, and, when several became dangerously ill, he sent them a purgative made from the roots of a morning glory, Ipomoea purga. Sometime in the 1530's, a Genoese adventurer returned to Seville, Pasquall Catano, convinced Nicolas Monardes that Mechoacán was more effective than existing medicines.
By the time the physician to Philip II was writing in 1569 the herb, now called jalap, had spread through the Spanish, Italian, German and Flemish-speaking Roman Catholic states to treat dropsy and was threatened with inferior substitutions in trade. One was the familiar four o’clock, called false jalap, whose flowers fascinated John Gerard in 1597 because they came in five colors, often with two colors on the same flower, and the colors varied from day to day on a single plant. He compared them to both tobacco and bindweed.
It’s not clear how Gerard got his plants, but it was grown in Persia by his contemporary, Shah Abbas, and was soon after taken to Malabar, probably by the Portuguese. The Marvel of Peru is perennial in zone 9 where temperatures may fall to 20 degrees and grows in coastal Ecuador and Perú where Pizarro’s cousin, Francisco de Orellana, founded Guayaquil in 1537, as well as in Bolivia’s Cochabamba valley where Garci Ruiz de Orellana bought land in 1542 to grow food for the Potosí mines.
While tubers may have moved from Lima’s port, El Callao, to the isthmus and across to Nombre de Dios for reshipment by Spanish carriers, John Parry suggests there was an illicit route to Potosí along an Amazonian tributary, the Paraná, used by the Portuguese and Dutch, after Franciso de Orellano found the Amazon from the Andes in 1542. Today, Laurimar Rocha says maravilha is common in the Brazilian coastal states from Paraná north and has been used to treat edema, the retained fluids once referred to as dropsy, as well as other problems. Gerard was more likely to have obtained his plants from a Dutch source.
It isn’t clear either which plant settlers here in the rio arriba knew, jalap or false jalap. It’s not even known if the medicas who talked with Leonora Curtin were descendants of families who came with Oñate or the later ones who moved north from Zacatecas in the 1700's. But it is obvious they transferred their expectations to the local four o’clock, maravilla, which they used to treat dropsy.
The local Nyctaginaceae apparently was known by farmer-hunters who used the Fresnal Canyon rock shelter in New Mexico’s Sacramento mountains sometime between 1700 BC and 100 AD. When anthropologists collected ethnobotanic information in the twentieth century, they found the perceptions of utility varied with the experiences of their informants with other plants: Keres speakers used the dried gray leaves like tobacco while the Hopi chewed the roots as an hallucinogen. The only ones who mentioned puhu for swellings, possibly of "dropsical origin," were the ones in this valley, the Santa Clara, who had had the most intimate relations with the Spanish.
It may be the idea of using the tubers of big-seeded, funnel-shaped purplish flowers that collapse into umbrellas after dawn to treat dropsy and other medical problems was brought by the Purhépecha from South America and adapted to the jalap. Their Tarascan language is unlike any in México and Joseph Greenburg suggests it may be related to the Chibchan spoken in lower Central America and Colombia where four o’clocks also grow.
The amazing thing is that all three plants have been proven effective by whatever paradigm scientists have chosen to test the consequences of a mental construct that moved from the four o’clocks of South America to the jalap of western México to Spain, and then back to México and up the Rio Grande to the local Mirabilis, at times abetted by an interest in new flowers that moved to England and back across the Atlantic to Michigan and down to the Española valley.
Notes:
Bohrer Vorsila L. "Recognition and Interpretation of Prehistoric Remains of Mirabilis multiflora (Nyctaginaceae) in the Sacramento Mountains of New Mexico," Torrey Botanical Club Bulletin 102:21-25:1975.
Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.
Dymock, William, C. J. H. Warden, and David Hooper. Pharmacographia Indica: A History of the Principal Drugs of Vegetable Origin, Met with in British India, 1890-1893, 1972 reprint by Hamdard.
Gerard, John. Gerard’s Herball, 1597; reprinted as Leaves from Gerard’s Herball, 1969, from a 1929 edition by Marcus Woodward.
Greenberg, Joseph H. Language in the Americas, 1987.
Missouri Botanical Garden. "Mirabilis jalapa L: Literature Based Distribution," available on-line.
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, translated by John Frampton as Joyfull Newes out of the New Founde Worlde, 1577, and republished by Stephen Gaselee, 1925. Monardes calls him Caconcin Casique, the last the title for the tribal leader, calzonci. I found no confirmation for the miraculous cure.
Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, and on-line database includes George R. Swank, The Ethnobotany of the Acoma and Laguna Indians, 1932, and Alfred F. Whiting, Ethnobotany of the Hopi, 1939.
Parry, John Horace. The Spanish Seaborne Empire, 1981.
Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.
Rocha, Laurimar Thomé. Importância de Investigação Farmacológica de Mirabilis jalapa Linn Validação de Sua Utilização, 2006.
Photograph: Local perennial four o’clocks, 3 August 2008.
What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses in town, white sweet clover, purple asters; dead leaves on catalpa and some cottonwoods, others still yellow.
