The Living Arroyo

What’s happening: People pruning trees; Russian thistles breaking loose; Russian olive, juniper and pyracantha berries persist.

What’s still green: Moss, evergreen, yucca, grape hyacinth, Jupiter’s beard, phacelia, pink evening primrose, broom senecio, snakeweed, chrysanthemum leaves; some grasses.

What’s grey, blue-grey or grey-green: Piñon, four-winged salt bush, yellow alyssum and winterfat leaves.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla, Madonna lily, golden spur columbine, small-leaved soapwort, beardstongue, yellow evening primrose, creeping mahonia leaves; rose and young tamarix stems.

What’s yellow/turning yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches.

What’s blooming inside: Cleaned and trimmed plants moved back onto enclosed porch; zonal geraniums blooming; new leaves on deciduous chaste trees.

Animal sightings: Hawk, rabbit; mouse trying to get into house.

Weather: Winds; snow lingers in Jemez and Sangre de Cristo; last snow 2/4/11; 11:01 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Sometime during the recent cold spell a chunk of the prairie arroyo wall collapsed. Just before the temperatures fell below zero, there had been a little snow - not much, but apparently enough to freeze in the ground and serve as a wedge.

The same area was disturbed several times last year: once in April after several weeks of alternating rain and snow, then again in late December after our first, and only, real snowfall of the winter.

I suppose it’s not unusual for the soft sides of a bank to collapse, but it’s unexpected because I’ve grown accustomed to thinking of arroyos as static. I know, of course, that rocks change, but over millennia. Continental plates only move about 3 centimeters a year, less than an inch and a half. I simply don’t expect to see alternations in the structural landscape when there are no cataclysmic events, no volcanic eruptions, no earthquakes, no storms, not even any sharply contrasting seasons.

The part of the arroyo I walk is actually a dry, sandy stretch that parallels a fault. Up river, one feeder crosses the fault at the point where that branch meets two others that run from another fault in the Miocene uplands formed before the Rio Grande rift opened during the Pliocene. Below, the arroyo meets another arroyo, the narrow one, in the bottom lands, then flows into the Rio Grande.

The taller walls reveal alternating layers of sandy loam and gravel. The thicker slabs are silica enriched by clay. The thinner layers are silicon dioxide in the form of milky quartz and smaller amounts of granite. Both probably came from the Precambrian rock of the Sangre de Cristo, the one less weathered than the other. Quartz is one of the rocks least likely to age quickly.

Down river from where I enter the arroyo the left bank is steeper, perhaps from harder formations. At one place a folded ridge has been exposed. The land has eroded back a little along that ridge to create a second bottom above the tougher lower strata. The right bank is shallower and spreading.

The floor divides into five sections as the water, when it flows, forks around a central island where chamisa has stabilized the soil. On the soft side, between the water path and the wall, more plants grow, while only gravel and sand exist on the hard side.

Up river, it’s the right bank that’s steeper and the left that’s soft. The floor’s not divided, but again the vegetation is limited to the softer side.

Gravel spills from the opened layers whenever wind or rain dislodge it. Then the rock fragments are carried into the main flow of the arroyo where they skim the surface, marking the borders of the water paths, until they’re pushed into the soil by animals or moved farther along. Whatever actual rocks there are, usually no larger than a hand, also relodge along the water edge.

Last fall, after the summer rains, the floor near the downriver steep bank was glazed by glittering flakes of quartz that probably had floated on the surface of the water that carried away the pebbles, then dropped with the water level. The minute rockiness may be why the plants that live in the sandy arroyo don’t take root there, only Russian thistles and clammy weed.

The actual water channels are smooth like frosting when they’re wet, but molded by wind when the moisture evaporates. Some times, I’ll see no footprints in the sand, only ripples in closely grained arcs or wider, deeper partial chevrons. Other times, I can identify my own shoe prints from the week before.

The sections of the upriver steep wall that fell a few weeks ago are a bit like adobe, cakes of mud and stone bound by sticky clay. With time, the wind and rain will strip them, layer by layer, but the process may not be perceptible. The earlier collapsed section was only smoothed by last summer’s rain, not visibly shrunken.

The arroyo may not change as often as the Mississippi, but it lives at its own pace. In the 1920's, D. H. Lawrence wrote about the local landscape that it “lived, and lived as the world of the gods, unsullied and unconcerned. The great circling landscape lived its own life, sumptuous and uncaring. Man did not exist for it.”

Notes:

Sangre de Cristo uplift

Miocene: 24.6 to 5.1 million years ago

Pliocene: 5.1 to 2 million years ago

Koning, Daniel J. “Preliminary Geologic Map of the Española 7.5-minute Quadrangle,” New Mexico Bureau of Geology, May 2002.

Lawrence, D. H. “St. Mawr,” 1925; the last part was set at his cabin outside Taos provided by Mabel Dodge Luhan.

Photograph: Arroyo, 19 February 2011. The section in front came down in the past three weeks; the section in back fell last April. A Russian thistle and a clammy weed are all that grew there last summer.

Strapleaf Aster

What’s happening: New leaves on golden spur columbine; Russian olive, juniper and pyracantha berries persist.

What’s still green: Moss, evergreen, yucca, grape hyacinth, Jupiter’s beard, phacelia, pink evening primrose, broom senecio leaves; some grasses.

What’s grey, blue-grey or grey-green: Piñon, four-winged salt bush, yellow alyssum and winterfat leaves.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla, Madonna lily, small-leaved soapwort, beardstongue, yellow evening primrose, creeping mahonia leaves; rose and young tamarix stems.

What’s yellow/turning yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums on enclosed porch; aptenia in house.

Animal sightings: A mouse came into the house in December when it was cold, but nothing invaded during the past cold spell.

Weather: Clouds all week at daybreak, winds yesterday; last snow 2/4/11; 10:30 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: When I was a child in the 1950's, I was told composites were the youngest plant family, with the implication that everything had been formed.

Much of the early evidence for evolution had come from fossils laying in chronologically created rock strata. Plant families were seen as life forms that had emerged in particular past climates, the evergreens in the Carboniferous, the ferns in the Triassic, the grasses in the Oligocene. Each was thought to have flourished in its time, with only the most adaptable surviving the subsequent changes in environment.

Composites may have diverged in the Eocene, some 36 to 42 million years ago, but they have survived the tropical Eocene, the dry Oligocene, and the frozen Pleistocene to become the ones most actively adapting to the geobotanical present.

Some argue the reason the family has proliferated is its reproductive strategy matches modern conditions. Instead of a single flower or cluster, numerous small individual florets are held in clumps in a single receptacle, often with the large, outer ray flowers serving no other purpose that attracting insects to the central disk flowers. The seeds are dispersed by wind-driven parachutes.

Since I was a child, botanists have renamed the family the Asteraceae, and turned from fossils to DNA for evidence. They’ve exchanged the absolute "the" and superlative "est" for the safer "a" and "er" as they’ve come to recognize evolution is not just history.

Strapleafed spiny asters have traditional composite flowers, with a single ring of pollen producing rays surrounding yellow, bisexual disks. The long, narrow rays open mid-morning from early or mid June to early November and close each afternoon.

The perennials range from the prairie provinces of Canada to the silver producing states of México. Within that wide belt of plains and dry grasslands, the four pairs of chromosomes are permutating with clear patterns of selection appearing only in areas where populations have become isolated. In a few areas, the number of chromosomes has doubled to 16.

Whenever the separation is destroyed, subspecies begin interbreeding with other populations. Plants in the nodes have taken many forms, which in turn has led to at least ten generic names. The areas between the clearly formed species are filled with gradations that have led to the current preferred term, the Xanthisma spinulosum complex.

In our area the woody stems of the spinulosum subspecies branch almost immediately, to send radiating stems out six or eight inches along the ground before they curve up to hold single, terminal flower heads. When they first emerge, the alternate leaves resemble herringbone evergreens with sharp points.

As the stems elongate, the distance between the leaves expands, while the leaves lengthen with short lobes along central midribs that give them the name tansy aster. Up close, the leaves are bright green, but from a distance appear gray from fine hairs.

Down the Rio Grande in south Texas, the austrotexanum subspecies has an erect, unbranched habit with less deeply incised leaves and no glandular hairs. To the west in Arizona, the gooddingii subspecies has shiny leaves, tall, erect stems, and larger flowers.

Sleepy daisies seem to be particularly sensitive to variations in environment. At the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge north of Socorro, the plants prefer the black grama steppes to the blue grama grasslands. The first have rockier, coarser soils than the second, and tend to favor plants like these with long taproots.

During the 1930's, drought along the Missouri River in Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas killed many of the grasses and forbs. Strapleaf asters were one of the few not only able to survive in the drier western areas, but to spread east to colonize newly barren areas when the high winds of the period transported their yellowish-brown seed vessels with the loosened soil.

The plants are often seen in disturbed or open areas: they were first collected by Lewis and Clark on September 15, 1804, the day they passed the mouth of the White River in South Dakota. However, it may not be the tiny seeds need disturbed soil to germinate so much as the plants disappear when competition develops.

They grew in my yard between 1997 and 2002, but never in the same place. Then, a single plant bloomed for two years under the black locust, before disappearing. With the changing population of grasses, they behaved more like annuals than perennials.

Last summer I noticed them in the prairie growing in bare ground left by four-wheeled all terrain vehicles about five to ten feet away from the drop into the arroyo. They appeared there again this past summer.

The Sevilleta research team believes one reason non-grasses like strapleaf asters can coexist with black grama, but not with blue, is that the first begins growth later in the season after the plants have developed, while blue grama emerges earlier and competes with forbs for resources.

Here the pointed yellow rays seem particular well adapted to the cold: both years they continued to appear after morning temperatures had fallen below freezing. Soon after temperatures reached 20 degrees last November, the roots produced new basal growth. After the snow and zero degree cold of late December, those leaves turned dark green and may have died. However, new basal growth has appeared on a few, below the bare woody stems from last season.

Botanists have come to recognize new species result from mutations and genetic experimentation by nature, and that, over time, those species begin to solidify through continued genetic selection. What they’ve found with strapleaf asters is a species that is simultaneously proliferating and winnowing in an evolutionary present.

Notes:
Barkley, Theodore M., Luc Brouillet and John L. Strother "Asteraceae Martinov," on eFloras’ Flora of North America website, summarizes current knowledge on plant family.

Kröel-Dulay, György, Péter Ódor, Debra P.C. Peters and Tamara Hochstrasser. "Distribution of Plant Species at a Biome Transition Zone in New Mexico," Journal of Vegetation Science 15: 531-538, 2004; identifies Machaeranthera pinnatifida.

McDougall, W. B. "Lessons in Botany," National Park Service Region III Quarterly 3:7-10: October 1941, summarizes the received wisdom of my mother’s generation.

Peterson Field Guide. Southwestern and Texas Wildflowers, by Theodore F. Niehaus with illustrations by Charles L. Ripper and Virginia Savage; uses the term strapleaf spine aster for Machaeranthera spinulosa.

Turner, B. L. "Xanthisma spinulosum var. austrotexanum (Asteraceae: Astereae), An Endemic of Southernmost Texas," Phytologia 89:349-352:2007.

_____ and Guy L. Nesom. "Taxonomic Review of the Xanthisma spinulosum Complex (Asteraceae: Astereae)," Phytologia 89:371-389:2007.

Weaver, J. E. and F. W. Albertson. "Deterioration of Grassland From Stability to Denudation with Decrease in Soil Moisture," Botanical Gazette 101:598-624:1940; identifies Sideranthus spinulosus.

Photograph: Young leaves, some probably killed by cold, at base of prairie strapleaf aster with seed (achene), 13 February 2011.

White Bird of Paradise

What’s happening: Russian olive, juniper and pyracantha berries persist.

What’s still green: Evergreens, yuccas, grape hyacinth, Jupiter’s beard, broom senecio leaves; some grasses.

What’s grey, blue-grey or grey-green: Piñon, four-winged salt bush and winterfat leaves; piñon have been dropping leaves, leaving bare grey stems that make the trees look frosted from a distance.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla leaves, Madonna lily, small-leaved soapwort, beardstongue, creeping mahonia leaves; rose stems.

What’s yellow/turning yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches.

What’s blooming inside: Plants have not moved back to their porch yet, but zonal geraniums are still blooming.

Animal sightings: Flock of large birds flying south Friday morning; small birds out here around noon.

Weather: Morning temperatures are no longer below zero, but are still cold; last snow 2/4/11; 10:11 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: As winter progresses, the dry air between the storms draws water from plants, dead and alive. At first, the color in pigments intensifies, then, as the season passes, the dead matter blanches.

Cary Pirone was fascinated by seeds of white bird of paradise palms because their feathery caps or arils retain their orange color for decades. Then she discovered why: instead of a plant pigment, they contain one previously found only in animals. Bilirubin develops when red cells break down to produce the yellow found in bruises and jaundice. At that point in its chemical life, it’s insoluble in water, which explains why it persists where water-based plant pigments fade.

Most of us never see those bright seeds. We buy Strelitzia nicolai as a house plant which sometimes produces clusters of white flowers held in dark, boat-shaped bracts. The three white, deeply segmented sepals that give the plant its common name rise above the blue petals that surround the nectary. Two are fused to form a channel for the glucose and fructose, while the shorter, third stands above.

In their native dunes along the South African coast from the eastern cape into Mozambique the Natal wild banana is fertilized by sunbirds who land on the bracts, then walk over the lower petals to get to the nectar. As they move, their feet accidentally pick up and drop pollen. Barbets and starlings eat the fruit and spread the seeds.

Less usefully, vervet and samango monkeys eat the flowers, as do blue duikers and bush babies. Insects visit, but don’t pollinate, while bats and frogs live under their protection and predatory mosquitoes and some fungi live in the joints between the leaves and the woody stems.

If we buy the plants for color, it’s more likely for the green of the great oar-shaped leaves which provide a screen against the desolation of winter.

Writers at the PlantCare website believe the plant’s popularity can be traced to a cover of Architectural Digest from the late 1970's. When the photographers needed to fill some empty space, they brought in white birds of paradise for drama. From there the tropical plants spread, first to decorators, then through the mass market to shopping mall atriums.

The owners of the featured apartment never had to worry about the growth habits of the white bird of paradise. The pots were trucked back to the nursery after the shoot.

However, those who imitated the cover soon discovered the plants can quickly outgrow a normal home. In Africa, where they can receive 40 to 50" of rain a year, the tree Xhosa speakers call Ikhamanga and Zulu call Igceba can grow 40' high. Single clumps can reach 13' wide. When nurseries sell them in this country, they often put two in a pot to give the illusion of fullness.

When I took my current job, the boss’s wife had sent hers to the office where its leaves got in everyone’s way. The foreman pushed it far into a corner, then tethered it to the wall. Whenever the leaf margins split, the office manager hacked it with a knife. It got little water because the flimsy plastic saucer underneath had cracked. They succeeded in killing one of the clumps, but the other survived with a few leaves.

A few months ago we moved into a new office. I had someone buy a larger, stronger saucer and the boss dictated it would be given the window. It spread 60". The tallest leaf reached 76", while the largest leaf blade was 38" long.

When I came in the following Monday, there was a second pot with two more plants. One of my boss’s friends was closing his decorators’ showroom, and the thing had to go somewhere. Its arching stems spread 80", wider than the 6' window, and brushed desks on both sides.

We call these great leaves, so unlike our native vegetation, bananas or palms. In fact, as might be expected of a bird pollinated, animal pigmented plant, they’re members of a small family, Strelitziaceae, with only one species, Phenkospermum guyannense, found outside Africa. They emerged 49 to 55 million years ago when jungles dominated the Earth and color never faded.

Notes: A blue duiker is a small antelope; a bushbaby is a small nocturnal primate.

Frost, S. K. and P. G. H. Frost. "Sunbird Pollination of Strelitzia nicolai," Oecologia 49:379–384:1981.

Letsela, Moeketsi. "Strelitzia nicolai Regel & Koern.," Plantzafrica website, 2002, with additions by Yvonne Reynolds.

Muspratt, J. "The Bionomics of an African Megarhinus (Dipt., Culicidae) and Its Possible Use in Biological Control," Bulletin of Entomological Research 42: 355-370:1951.

Nichols, Geoff. Down to Earth: Gardening with Indigenous Shrubs, 2002.

Pirone, Cary L. Bilirubin: an Animal Pigment in the Zingiberlaes and Diverse Angiopserm Orders, 2010.

PlantCare.com. "White Bird of Paradise - Strelitzia nicolai," available on-line.

Photograph: White birds of paradise, 9 February 2011. The one in front is from the designer showroom; the one in back from a decorator’s house.

Sandbur

What’s happening: We won’t know until spring how much has been killed by these bitter temperatures and dry ground; Russian olives, juniper and pyracantha berries persist.

What’s still green: A thin layer of snow covers most things; evergreens, yuccas, some grasses show.

What’s grey, blue-grey or grey-green: Piñon, four-winged salt bush and winterfat leaves.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla leaves; rose stems, although they’ve been covered with icicles since Thursday.

What’s yellow/turning yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches.

What’s blooming inside: When we lost our heat Thursday morning, I brought everything into the house where temperatures fall to the 40's, rather than the 20's.

Animal sightings: Rabbit tracks in snow when I left for work mid-morning Thursday.

Weather: The temperature fell to -12 Thursday morning, the lowest I ever remember, with only the slightest snow cover; last snow 2/5/11; 9:53 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: This is the time of year when the most noxious weeds find ways to make human intruders plant their seeds. When I came in Wednesday morning from clearing snow off a thermometer that read 4 degrees, I had a sandbur in my heavy wool sock. It must have been hiding in my rubbers since I last wore them in December.

While I won’t believe it was lurking in the snow, I can believe the sandbur represents one of nature’s most hostile responses to changing environmental conditions.

The Cenchrus genus of grass probably emerged in tropical east Africa. Amelia Chemisquy’s team believes one of its ancestors was the parent of either Pennisetum ramosum, found today in tropical Africa, or Pennisetum orientale, which ranges from northern Africa through the Arabian peninsula into the Caucasus and Himalayas. The other possible parent was the progenitor of Pennisetum setaceum, which grows from tropical Africa north to the Mediterranean littoral that spreads from the Maghreb to the Levant.

Cenchrus longispinus probably developed in North America where it ranged from the Continental Divide to the Appalachians in 1971. Early in the twentieth century, Elmer Wooten and Paul Standley called it one of "the most pernicious weeds" in New Mexico, common in sandy soil at lower elevations throughout the state. Tewa speakers called it Ta nwæ’ig or thorny grass; Spanish speakers called it roseta.

This particular species has become an annual, no longer dependent on warm temperatures for survival. While the seeds may only last about three years, their germination rates are high. J. D. Twentyman found over 96% of those that managed to be buried, germinated within 2 years.

More important, he discovered the burs hold two types of seeds. The ones in the upper spikelet germinate within a year. The lower ones go dormant, and emerge more slowly. They’re programmed to not germinate when exposed to light or unfavorable high or low temperatures.

Beginning in May, the seedlings, which resemble barnyard grass, emerge directly from the bur. Various experts advise people they can confirm their identity by poking around the roots for the burs. This seems silly for two reasons: if they are sandburs, you hurt your finger; if they’re not, you harm a grass you might like to encourage in its place.

I’ve learned the leaves emerge in a V on opposite sides of a center, much like iris leaves. At that stage, the plant is flat to the touch. The more desirable grasses tend to be rounded. Still when you pull them, the underlying bur doesn't come out, but stays in the soil with that slow germinating seed.

Soon after, the leaves start to grow flat in a circle and resemble crabgrass. In July, zig-zagging stalks emerge from the center with bright green flower receptacles that already bear sharp spines. Inside are two minute flowers: the upper one is fertile with two stigmas, the other sterile or male. Flowers continue to appear as the stalk elongates, so the lower burs already hold viable seed while the top is still blooming.

Removing the plants at this time is much trickier than in June. I reach under the leaves and pull the fibrous roots from the soil, then try to carry the flat, round disk of a plant so no part can touch me. When I drop it in a plastic trash bag, I tell myself to remember it’s there so I won’t put something in later and reach down to compact the contents.

The prickles on the oval burs are formed from fused aborted branches on the flowering head. The lower spines are shorter that those above, and point downward. They all attach like velcro.

The only way to remove them is to use your nails and get beneath them so as few spines as possible find your flesh. It’s surprising how quickly you learn to remember the hidden contents of a trash bag.

As the plant completes its annual cycle, the burs harden and fall from the stems. With a killing frost, both the burs and remaining leaves fade to a whitened sand that emphasizes the ridges in the leaves and the sharp spines. By the following spring, the burs are dirty brown. The only ways they can be removed from the surface then is with a trowel or, less happily, a sleeve or pant leg.

During the fall and winter, the burs prevent most animals from eating the one to three seeds within. However, mice are more cunning. Around Pinckney, Michigan, prairie deer mice eat the seeds, while sandbur seeds are collected by plains pocket mice in Minnesota and hispid pocket mice in Oklahoma.

Longspined sandburs can pioneer seemingly barren soil and attach themselves to the animals who may be responsible for the devastation. In the past, I suspect they used the large mammals, then the buffalo to migrate and reclaim disturbed areas. More recently, they have followed sheep and men. They particularly like to colonize abandoned farm lands.

The seeds also punish those sloppy in their harvesting techniques. Wooten and Standley said the burs were particularly common then in alfalfa fields, suggesting contaminated seed. They migrate to Australia in corn exported from this country, then make handling wool dangerous.

Sandburs don’t much like competition - they need the wind to bury and fertilize them. Eventually they will die out where other plants are allowed to take over. However, I suspect even then the impotent burs will persist to attack anyone who wants to redisturb the ground, a knightly protector even in death.

Notes:Australia. Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. "Weed Risk Analysis of a Proposed Importation of Bulk Maize (Zea mays) from the USA," March 1999.

Blair, L. F. "Faunal Relationships and Geographic Distribution of Mammals in Oklahoma,"
The American Midland Naturalist 22:85-133:1939.

Chemisquy, M. Amelia, Liliana M. Giussani, María A. Scataglini, Elizabeth A. Kellogg and Osvaldo Morrone. "Phylogenetic Studies Favour the Unification of Pennisetum, Cenchrus and Odontelytrum (Poaceae): A Combined Nuclear, Plastid and Morphological Analysis, and Nomenclatural Combinations in Cenchrus," Annals of Botany 106: 107-130:2010.

Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.

Hibbard, E. A. and J. R, Beer. "The Plains Pocket Mouse in Minnesota," Flicker 23:89-94:1960.

Howard, Walter E. and Francis C. Evans. "Seeds Stored by Prairie Deer Mice," Journal of Mammalogy 42:260-263:1961.

Iowa State University. Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology. "Sandbur (Longspine Sandbur)," Grasses of Iowa website.

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

Twentyman, J. D. "Environmental Control of Dormancy and Germination in the Seeds of Cenchrus longispinus (Hack.) Fern.," Weed Research 14:1–11:1974.

United States Department of Agriculture. Agricultural Research Service. Selected Weeds of the United States, 1970, reprinted by Dover as Common Weeds of the United States, 1971.

_____. _____. Germplasm Resources Information Network. Distributions for Pennisetum species available on line.

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

Photograph: Sandbur laying beside the road, 30 January 2011; burs are hidden among the leaves.

Creeping Mahonia

What’s happening: Globe willow branches look browner while upper reaches of cottonwoods look whiter.

What’s still green: Evergreens, yuccas, Japanese honeysuckle, grape hyacinth, sea pink, Jupiter’s beard, stickseed, gypsum phacelia, golden spur columbine, pink primrose, blue flax, vinca, young snakeweed, broom senecio, strap leaf aster, chrysanthemum leaves; young chamisa stems.

What’s grey, blue-grey or grey-green: Piñon, four-winged salt bush, snow-in-summer, stickleaf, winterfat, golden hairy aster leaves.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla, beardtongue, Madonna lily, heath aster leaves; rose stems.

What’s yellow/turning yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches.

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

Animal sightings: One radio station is advertising feed for jays and woodpeckers. Unless one has large land holdings left to nature, who ever would want those birds around the house and yard?

Weather: Morning temperatures usually in the low 20's; last snow 12/30/10; 9:27 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Winter’s a time of discovery. Since Adam, leaves have provided privacy. When they fall, the unexpected ‘s revealed.

Two weeks ago I noticed three burgundy-colored holly leaves growing under a ramp where they’d been hidden behind a raspberry. Those leaves had disintegrated. The nearby camouflaging vegetation was gone. Creeping mahonia stood exposed to the morning sun.

The ground hugging member of the barberry family is native to shady parts of the Rocky mountains from northern México into Canada. In New Mexico, the broadleaf evergreen grows between 8,000 and 10,000' with Douglas fir and white fir, where precipitation averages 25" a year. In areas too cold for white fir, Berberis repens grows with Douglas fir and Gambel oak, where the mean annual air temperature is 41 degrees and the soil frigid. Early in the twentieth century, it was reported in the Santa Fe, Las Vegas and Sandia mountains as well as up at Chama.

The only native peoples who used the berberine containing plant were the Navajo. However, Leonora Curtin found Spanish-speaking people boiled yerba de la sangre leaves to treat anemia and induce menstruation. No one mentioned eating the blue berries, which are bitter until chilled by frost.

I doubt the single unbranched stem was a native volunteer. While an established plant can tolerate a wide range of soils, temperatures and rain levels, it seems less tolerant of drought or sun at lower altitudes, where it tends to grow only on north facing slopes, and doesn’t like the drying winds of late winter.

I’m probably responsible for its appearance. I planted four grape holly seedlings in April of 2006 in that area. Two survived the year to emerge the following March, but disappeared in May with the spring moisture. They were sold by Hardy Boys, who provide seed-grown bedding plants to local stores. I assume this yellow-wooded shrub may have come from some dormant seed in one of the pots.

In ideal laboratory conditions on wet paper, Perry Plummer’s team found seeds required 30 days at 34 degrees, 60 days at 70, and then more time at 34. After more than six months (196 days) of added cold, 62% of the seeds germinated. When temperatures were returned to 70, another 12% sprouted.

Fire may produce similar results. Buried seeds can survive cold soils for years without losing viability. Roger Kjelgren found he could germinate pips by treating them with hot water before chilling them for 60 days.

In contrast, Ken Fern was able to sprout seeds in England within six weeks when he removed them from their waxy wrappers before they were fully ripened, that is after the embryos had developed but before the seed cases had dried. In Utah, Richard Stevens and Kent Jorgensen only had 25% of their fresh seed germinate.

Black bears, which inhabit the mixed conifer forests of the Jemez and Sangre de Cristo, gulp the fruit as soon as it’s available in summer, probably before the seed ripens. The seeds pass through unbroken, but germinate better than ones given the usual warm and cold treatments. Janene Auger’s group suspects that digestion may replace the heat phase so they can sprout the following spring after the cold of winter.

Bears are mobile creatures. Some distance may exist between where they forage for food or water and where they live under or in rocks and trees. Creeping mahonia does best in dappled shade, but is often the only plant growing under mature canopies on rocky or gravelly soil where it rarely blooms. In such cases, it can reproduce from new shoots emerging from underground rhizomes or can be renewed by bear droppings.

In early spring, six-petaled yellow flowers appear in clusters towards the ends of stems which get some sun, especially those near streams where bears drink. The leathery leaves respond to the brighter light by producing more red anthocyanin pigments in their outer cells that scavenge excess oxygen radicals.

When the leaves turn color in fall, the amount of red pigment in exposed leaves doubles while the photosynthesis rate decreases and the leaves begin retaining higher levels of certain xanthophyll pigments to block light. Leaves of plants in shade remain unchanged when temperatures drop.

I don’t know if the stoloniferous roots are established enough to survive this dry winter. So far we’ve had less than three inches of snow and the morning frost has been pulled more from plants and the ground than passing clouds. Two weeks ago, the edges of the leaves were brown. Last week, the dead band had increased. Yesterday, the black spot on one was larger.

It would have been better if the raspberry had managed to keep its parasol of dead leaves and let the mahonia hide in its shady wind shadow.

Notes:
Auger, Janene, Susan E. Meyer and Hal L. Black. "Are American Black Bears (Ursus Americanus) Legitimate Seed Dispersers for Fleshy-Fruited Shrubs?," American Midland Naturalist 147:352-367:2002; they saw one male bear pass nearly 60,000 creeping mahonia seeds in 24 hours.

Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.

Fern, Ken. "Mahonia repens - (Lindl.) G. Don.," Plants for a Future website.

Grace, Stephen C., Barry A. Logan, and William W. Adams III. "Seasonal Differences in Foliar Content of Chlorogenic Acid, a Phenylpropanoid Antioxidant, in Mahonia repens," Plant, Cell & Environment 21:513–521:May 1998.

_____, _____, _____ and Barbara Demmig-Adams. "Seasonal Differences in Xanthophyll Cycle Characteristics and Antioxidants in Mahonia repens Growing in Different Light Environments," Oecologia 116:9-17:1998.

Kjelgren, Roger. "Mahonia repens," 2003, discussed by John K. Francis, "Mahonia repens (Lindl.) G. Don.," available on-line.

Moir, W. H.. "Alpine Tundra and Coniferous Forest" in William A. Dick-Peddie, New Mexico Vegetation, 1993.

Plummer, A. Perry, Donald R. Christensen, and Stephen B. Monsen. Restoring Big-Game Range in Utah, 1968.

Stevens, Richard and Kent R. Jorgensen. "Rangeland Species Germination through 25 and up to 40 Years of Warehouse Storage," Ecology and Management of Annual Rangelands, Proceedings, 1992, published 1994.

Wooten, Elmer Otis and Paul Carpenter Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915; also mentions the Black Range, Tunitcha, Carrizo, Zuni, and Sacramento mountains, as well as Dulce, Ramah, and Luna.

Photograph: Creeping mahonia, 29 January 2011.

Madonna Lily

What’s happening: Pampas grass plumes have been cut down. Men beginning to prune their apples. Grey smoke from burning was visible everywhere yesterday.

What’s still green: Moss, evergreens, yuccas, Japanese honeysuckle, grape hyacinth, sea pink, stickseed, gypsum phacelia, blue flax, vinca, snakeweed, broom senecio, strap leaf aster, chrysanthemum leaves; young chamisa stems; new growth on Jupiter’s beard.

What’s grey, blue-grey or grey-green: Piñon, four-winged salt bush, snow-in-summer, stickleaf, winterfat, golden hairy aster leaves.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla, beardtongue, heath aster leaves; rose stems.

What’s yellow/turning yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches; pyracantha leaves bronzed.

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

Animal sightings: Saw the rabbit twice at the usual time in the morning when the temperature was just above freezing; another day it came out an hour later.

Weather: Morning temperatures generally a bit warmer; last snow 12/30/10; 9:12 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Madonna lilies are one of those short branches towards the top of the Lilium family tree reserved for nature’s experiments. Most of their annual rites we observe are events that make them a family outcast: they go dormant in August, put out overwintering leaves in fall, produce the only white, trumpet-shaped flowers in Europe in spring.

Lilies are thought to have emerged in the Himalayas and moved from there to Asia and North America. The red Lilium martagon, with its Turk’s cap flowers, moved to Europe where it became the most widely distributed of the lilies. Later, the orange colored bulbiflorum moved into central Europe. Then, the remaining European lilies, all reddish, moved west from the Caucasus.

Somewhere on the west coast of the Balkan peninsula Madonna lilies appeared, genetically close to two others known only in Turkey, ciliatum and akkusianum. They were valued by the Minoans of Crete at least 3700 years ago, and may have been spread through their trade network to nearby Anatolia and the Levant, where they still grow wild today.

Through time and cultivation the common white lilies, with three petals and three sepals, lost their ability to produce seed and were perpetuated by bulbs dug and replanted during the short period of dormancy. More efficiently, Turks and others now produce Lilium candidum commercially by growing bulbs from scale cuttings.

Bulb scales are the modified leaves that surround the central geophyte core that contains the makings of the stem and flower. Above ground, leaves interact with the sun and carbon dioxide to produce food for the roots; below the surface they slowly release stored carbohydrates to maintain the plant during difficult times.

Since leaf cells tend to be porous, stored carbohydrates are modified to make them less water soluble. In Madonna lilies, foods are stored as waterproof starch grains in the leaf scales which dissolve when the sap chemistry changes with cold temperatures. Mannose is the form of sugar released.

The autumnal basal leaves supplement the stored reserves. Other lilies react to the cold by producing stem roots between the top of the bulb and the soil line. Madonna lilies are the only ones to use the leaves that are now turning red from the cold in my yard. They’re also the only ones that need to be planted shallowly and left alone.

The new season’s stem leaves begin forming in the bulb axis in November, while the next season’s bulb begins forming in December. The flowers begin developing in February. By April, the bulb’s reserves are exhausted, and the roots and above ground parts take over sustaining the plant.

While the cultivated plant has become sterile, some of the wild subspecies are still able to produce seed, especially salonikae found on the northern coast of the Aegean. When the seeds are ripe, they germinate as soon as they’ve undergone a cold period. The low temperature isn’t required to break dormancy, as it is with many plants, but simply is required to stimulate growth.

Both seedlings and bulb cuttings produce flowers in two years, assuming optimal conditions. When weather is less favorable, the plants spend their resources producing new bulbs, not flowers and seeds.

I bought my Madonna lilies in 2003 from a usually reliable supplier. However, something went wrong and I didn’t receive them until mid-November. The bulbs must have been kept cool enough in transit so they continued their internal development using only the stored reserves, which, of course, are always strongest in new, nursery-grown stock.

Still, nothing appeared for five years. Then, a pair of leaves broke ground in April, and two dark stems emerged with leaves in June of 2008. Naturally, they didn’t flower and I planted something else in their place that fall. Who knows what leaves grew the following June. Certainly nothing appeared this spring.

The first sign the original bulbs had survived underground was the five sets of basal rosettes I noticed this past December. Almost every one has a secondary pair of leaves near the main rosette, suggesting there is both a large bulb underground and a smaller one that hasn’t yet built up enough critical reserves to stand alone.

If sufficient cold in October is all they’ve been waiting for, this could be their year to bloom. But first, the leaves and flower buds will have to survive the treachery of a New Mexico spring. There’s a reason they throve on the moist, limestone soils of England when they finally reached that island sometime before John Gerard describe them as common in 1597, and there’s a reason they’re a marginal survivor here.

A aberrant love for cold is only part of the story.

Notes:Dafni, Amots, Dan Cohen and Imanuel Noy-Mier. "Life-Cycle Variation in Geophytes," Missouri Botanical Garden Annals 68:652-660:1981.

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

Ikincil, Nursel, Christoph Oberprieler and Adil Güner. "On the Origin of European Lilies: Phylogenetic Analysis of Lilium Section Liriotypus (Liliaceae) Using Sequences of the Nuclear Ribosomal Transcribed Spacers," Willdenowia 36:647-656:2006; relies on Richard William Lighty, "Evolutionary Trends in Lilies," North American Lily Society Yearbook 31, 40-44:1983, for biogeography.

McRae, Edward A. Lilies: A Guide for Growers and Collectors, 1998.

Oldfield, Sara. Bulb Propagation and Trade, 1989.

Parkin, J. "On a Reserve Carbohydrate, which Produces Mannose, from the Bulb of Lilium," Cambridge Philosophical Society Mathematical Proceedings 11:139-142:1902.

Photograph: Madonna lily leaves, possibly from a daughter bulb, 22 January 2011.

Cheese Mallow

What’s happening: To take advantage of early ordering discounts, I have to request plants before I have any idea how many will be dead by spring. Someone was burning his weeds yesterday.

What’s still green: Moss, evergreens, yuccas, Japanese honeysuckle, pyracantha, grape hyacinth, snapdragon, sea pink, cheese, stickseed, gypsum phacelia, blue flax, vinca, snakeweed, broom senecio, strap leaf aster leaves; rose and young chamisa stems.

What’s grey, blue-grey or grey-green: Piñon, four-winged salt bush, snow-in-summer, stickleaf, winterfat, golden hairy aster leaves.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla, beardtongue leaves.

What’s yellow/turning yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches.

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

Animal sightings: Animals are staying out of sight.

Weather: The snow has disappeared, leaving plants exposed to dry cold; last snow 12/30/10; 8:47 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The low growing, round-leafed cheese mallow can become a great nuisance in lawns, especially those where the grass isn’t yet dense.

Malva neglecta was introduced early into New England, then followed the Yankees west through the Northwest Territory. When it reached the Rockies, the annual spread southwest, moved into the intermontane region, and flourished in the Pacific states, all very different climates.

In this area, the weed appears sporadically, but hasn’t established itself. It’s always having to be reintroduced from somewhere else in the Española valley.

I saw an occasional dark green plant in my garden between 1996 and 2001, but nothing since. They probably came in the tires of the machines that leveled the land for the house and dug septic fields.

The tiny white flowers, with each petal marked by three darkened veins, were present in my neighbor’s yard in 2006 and 2007 where he kept his horses and their hay. Some hairy stems raised a few inches, but not as high as they can grow in more favorable conditions.

Then nothing until Christmas day when I saw two plants where they’d brought in heavy equipment and rocks last summer to stabilize the walls of the near arroyo. I hadn’t seen them the last time I walked that way, ten days before. Between we had our first snow, which put some moisture back into the soil, and daily temperatures that ranged between 10 and the mid-50's.

Indian researchers tested the tough-coated brown seeds in laboratory conditions, and found their ideal germination temperature was in the upper 60's. However, they could sprout when temperatures were as low as 50.

More important, Michigan State scientists found the flat seeds had to first undergo a six-week cold period to germinate. In 2000, Frank Telewski and Jan Zeevaart planted seeds preserved by James Beal in 1879 for a long term test of viability. The only ones that still sprouted were some Verbascum and a cheese.

That one isolated plant was able to reproduce itself. The five-petaled cup encloses ten styles which curl in different directions to fertilize the shorter stamens merged into a single column. In the wild, the nectar attracts various types of bees, small flies and an occasional cabbage butterfly.

It’s assumed the small mallow was introduced and spread accidentally, but it was more valued in the past when the mucilage in the sinewy taproots and leaves was used to improve the efficacy of other medicines. Also, the fact that it’s green in winter made it a valued vegetable, even to Pythagoras and the Greeks.

Last weekend, after the mornings of near zero temperatures, the fluted core leaves were still green and probably edible. However, the outer leaves had died.

When you see something growing out of season, you wonder how. Botanists have focused on the four proteins that control photosynthesis and transfer electrons between themselves. When temperatures drop, so does the rate of electronic energy and with it the demand for the raw materials that feed the process.

The first of the proteins in the chain, the inelegantly named photosytem II, appears to be the key to winter adaption. It utilizes the yellow xanthophyll pigments which absorb light from the center of the light spectrum that chlorophyll can’t process. During the summer, it creates a variant form, zeaxanthin, which rejects light during the heat of the day. In winter, a group at the University of Colorado found zeaxanthin levels remain high on very cold nights, which has the effect of slowing the carbon fixation that feeds photosynthesis and prevents an electron flow overload.

The team also found that Malva neglecta’s return to normal photosynthesis occurred in two phases. One, typical of days during cold spells, returned some normal functions within a few hours. However, the plant’s leaves did not return to normal levels of activity until several days of warm temperatures ensured it was safe to do so.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to watch the ruffled rosette respond to warmer temperatures this spring. Wednesday they brought back the big-wheels to install a guard rail on one side of the arroyo. The cheeses weren’t there yesterday and neither was the other guard rail.

Notes: For more on the xanthophyll cycle, see the posting on Autumn Leaves for 4 November 2007.

Barbara Demmig-Adams, William W. Adams III,, and Amy S. Verhoeven. "Close Relationship Between the State of the Xanthophyll Cycle Pigments and Photosystem II Efficiency during Recovery from Winter Stress," Physiologia Plantarum 96:567–576:1996.

_____, _____, Volker Ebbert, C. Ryan Zarter, and Todd N. Rosenstiel. "Photosynthesis and Photoprotection during Winter," American Society of Plant Biologists, 2002 meeting.

Hilty, John. "Common Mallow," Illinois Wildflowers website, on insect associations.

Kaur, Charanjeet, S. P. Mehra, and R. K. Bhatia. "Studies on the Biology of New Emerging Broadleaf Weed Malva neglecta Wallr," Indian Journal of Weed Science 40:172-177:2008.

Telewski, Frank W. and Jan A. D. Zeevaart. "The 120-yr Period for Dr. Beal's Seed Viability Experiment," American Journal of Botany 89:1285-1288:2002.

Photograph: Cheese mallow by the near arroyo, 9 January 2011.

Honey Locust

What’s happening: Extreme cold has bronzed most of the arborvitaes; some junipers look a desiccated grey.

What’s still green: Evergreens, yuccas, Japanese honeysuckle, pyracantha, grape hyacinth, snapdragon, sea pink, flax, vinca leaves; rose stems.

What’s grey, blue-grey or grey-green: Piñon, four-winged salt bush, snow-in-summer, winterfat, golden hairy aster leaves.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla, prickly pear, beardtongue leaves.

What’s yellow/turning yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Ravens in hay fields yesterday.

Weather: Mornings still very cold; afternoons warming just enough to melt some snow; last snow 12/30/10; 8:37 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: I rather tend to take trees for granted when I’m driving: they’re green in summer, yellow in fall, and bare in winter. The only time I actually see them is when they disturb that pattern, say when apricots bloom in spring or Russian olives produce grey leaves. After their star turns they step back into the chorus.

I noticed the honey locust down the road after the first snow of the season. Not only did it have dead leaves hanging below a mantle of snow, but those leaves were spotted with dark, curving pods. However, I didn’t see any silhouettes of the very long, sharp, hard thorns that usually sprout from the lower part of the bole.

Gleditsia triacanthos is native to the bottoms and limestone uplands of the Mississippi river valley from the Ohio to the Tennessee where the trees were never the dominant species, but instead grew in open spaces with bur oaks, willows, and American elms. There’s some suspicion native peoples may have expanded their range.

Several Cherokee settlements were called Kulsetsiyi, suggesting they were near honey locust groves. James Mooney heard one tale about a young man who went to the thunder god telling him he was his son. Thunder answered, he had been many places, had many children, and asked him to sit on a blanket of hidden kulsetsi thorns. When he wasn’t harmed, Thunder acknowledged him as a son.

Thunder asked why he had come. The young man said to be cured of skin sores. Thunder’s wife threw him into a pot of boiling water, then tossed him in the river. When he arose cleansed, she warned him to select the meanest snakes to wear and threaten the honey locust when he tired of the ball game he would be forced to play against two of Thunder’s sons. When he started to strike the tree, Thunder stopped the game. The two opponents were young thunders, but the youth was revealed to be lightening.

Mooney doesn’t identify the sores and only says Thunder "put in some roots" into the pot. The most likely skin symptoms that would have sent a man to see a god for help were measles and small pox. Paul Hamel and Mary Chiltoskey were told an infusion of the locust pod had been used for measles, while Linda Taylor heard the neighboring Creek used "sprigs, thorns and branches" in a bath to prevent smallpox."

Anetsa games between settlements, now called la crosse, were preceded by dances around fires made from the wood of a tree struck, but not killed, by lightening, and wood from a honey locust. Charcoal from the tree that had survived a storm was daubed on the dancers the day of the game. On the way to the match, each player joined the shaman down by the river where his skin was pierced by a comb of sharp turkey bones.

When the English arrived, some borrowed the use of the pods’ sweet pulp from the Cherokee. Charred seeds have been recovered from remains of slave quarters of Rich Neck plantation near Williamsburg, probably the unused debris of foraged food. Others tried to absorb the trees into their traditional world: George Washington wanted to use them for a thorn hedge at Mount Vernon and sent two bushels of seed to his overseer from Philadelphia.

With time, the Cherokee were evicted, other species were found for thorny barriers and better sources for sugar became available. The honey locust faded into obscurity, simply another obstacle to clear to open a plantation or farmstead.

After world war II, a new market emerged for small trees that could grow in the new suburban yards. Honey locusts were considered, because their divided leaves allowed enough sun to pass for grass to grow beneath them. However, their other virtues were thought liabilities, until the Siebenthaler Company of Dayton introduced a thornless, sterile cultivar, Moraine, in 1949. William Flemer III marketed Shademaster, the variety sold locally, in 1955, then promoted the legume as a quick growing replacement for the dying American elms which tolerated winter salt and summer air pollution.

Normally honey locusts produce both male and female flowers on different branches of the same tree, or both female and hermaphroditic flowers. The thornless subspecies, inermis, occurs naturally, but rarely. Podless cuttings, often made from male branches or bud wood whose sex has not yet been defined, were used to develop new cultivars which then were commercially reproduced from root cuttings grafted or budded onto the wild species.

Flemer could patent his clone and protect its DNA. He couldn’t control the root stock. Robert Blair says the northern varieties harden off early in the autumn, but that southern ones continue growing and are more likely to suffer from frost damage when moved beyond their range.

The plants that appear in our local hardware often are ones intended for warmer Albuquerque ninety miles to the south and a thousand feet lower. The prices are low and the supplier’s grafting methods are, to be charitable, cost efficient. A great many of their roses revert to their Dr. Huey rootstock, while the roots of most of my trees have sprouted their own trunks.

Some years ago, the people who own the tree that caught my attention planted saplings along the sides of their property. At least the two in front and one immediately behind are honey locusts, though only the one has returned to its ancestors. Blair says that when they’re placed in difficult situations, the branches tend to spread wide, like this tree, as their thick surface roots spread to find water, here in the run off from the pavement.

The owners don’t seem to mind the tree isn’t the one they purchased. It blends anonymously into the scenery where a tree is just a tree, not a source for food or proof of manhood.

Notes:
Blair, Robert M. "Gleditsia triacanthos L. Honeylocust" in Russell M. Burns and Barbara H. Honkala, Silvics of North America, volume 2, 1990.

Franklin, Maria. An Archaeological Study of the Rich Neck Slave Quarter and Enslaved Domestic Life, 2004.

Haworth, Paul Leland. George Washington: Farmer, 2004.
Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998; summarizes data from a number of ethnographies, including Paul B. Hamel and Mary U. Chiltoskey, Cherokee Plants and Their Uses -- A 400 Year History, 1975, and Linda Averill Taylor, Plants Used As Curatives by Certain Southeastern Tribes, 1940.
Mooney, James. "The Cherokee Ball Play," The American Anthropologist 3:105-32:1890.

_____. Myths of the Cherokee, 1900.

Neson, Guy. "Honey Locust" fact sheet, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service website; not provide source for suggestion natives expanded the range of the tree.

Photograph: Honey locust growing beside the road, 2 January 2011. The first tree behind is also a honey locust.

Aeonium Arboreum

What’s happening: A thin layer of snow still covers many things; it’ll be a few days before the effects of the dry cold become obvious.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens, Apache plume, yuccas, Japanese honeysuckle, pyracantha leaves.

What’s grey, blue-grey or grey-green: Piñon, four-winged salt bush, pinks, snow-in-summer, winterfat, golden hairy aster leaves.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla, prickly pear.

What’s yellow/turning yellow: Arborvitae; globe and weeping willow branches.

What’s blooming inside: Christmas cactus, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Tracks of rabbit and something small with five toes in the snow.

Weather: Snow Thursday, followed by morning temperatures close to zero, the coldest I remember here; 9:50 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Seed catalogs have been arriving since Thanksgiving with their promises of a Hicksian peaceable kingdom where ferns and yuccas can co-exist in the same bed.

In Wildseed’s catalog, tuber vervain, which only inhabits the south from California to Virginia, is followed by wallflowers, which live only to the north. It implies one doesn’t need to live in the narrow band of counties in Kentucky and Virginia where the two species are native to enjoy both.

For those of us who have no luck with seeds, Stokes tells nurserymen how to sow pansies and impatiens so they’ll be in the stores when we want them. They don’t promise the native of cool springs in Europe and the rain forest child of New Guinea will grow in the same environmentally controlled room, but they can be produced by the same operation and planted in the same garden.

The international bazaar isn’t just the chimera of some bright copywriter. Here in highland New Mexico in frigid January, where some plants find cold moisture and afternoons above freezing stimulating, I don’t have to settle for the moss by the garage or the western stickseed by the fence post. I can look at new growth on the snow-in-summer from the Italian Apennines and the snapdragons from northeastern Spain. If I prefer to stay in my warm enclosed porch, I can look north to the Christmas cactus from Brazil or south at new leaves on the aeonium from the Spanish Canary Islands.

If Spain and Portugal appear more often than other countries in this list of homes for the tamed exotics, it’s only because their great explorations created a new vision of the possible. The Canaries, with their relict laurel forests from the time before the Mediterranean climate developed, lay in the path of the trade winds that carried European ships to and from the new worlds.

The seven islands reside on the thin ocean crust of the African plate, just west of Morocco, which rests firmly on the continental crust. As the plate shifted north in the early Miocene, volcanoes erupted on the periphery some 21 million years ago to form the first of the islands, Fuerteventura. Other the next millenia, the plates continued to drift and volcanoes and islands continued to form farther and farther west.

Around 15 million years ago, the first ancestor of aeoniums arrived on Fuerteventura, some member of the Crassula family that had migrated north along the eastern Africa coast, then west. As the islands formed, the newly created aeonium continued to migrate, adapting to each environment, until some 36 species have evolved in the Canaries, most unique to specific islands.

Eventually the plates moved so much they shut the Mediterranean sea from the Atlantic, precipitating a period of heat and dessication about 5.9 million years ago. A few million years later, some aeonium, probably some precursor of Aeonium balsamiferum, migrated from Lanzarote or Fuertaventura to an area of limestone rocks between Ida-ou-Tanane and the mouth of oued Noun on the Moroccan coast. With time that became the Aeonium arboreum growing on my porch.

How one species managed to jump what today is at least a 70 mile gap is open to speculation. One group noticed that while arboreum has none of the morphological features that attract birds, it’s the only aeonium that attracts nectar feeding species. Debra Lee Baldwin discovered, quite accidentally, that if she left cut stems of arboreum in water, they developed roots.

How I got my aeonium is simply another episode in the globalization of our choices that began with the great navigators. No matter how rationalized the empire or trade network, there are always colonial outposts where unwanted surpluses can be dumped. I’m no longer surprised by the oddities that wash up in the local hardware store, only a bit cautious about buying the unfamiliar.

Two years ago, strange succulents were being sold off in June. Gerald Klingaman thinks arboreums were being promoted as unusual Father’s Day gifts in Arkansas that year. I wondered fleetingly if they were intended for deck pots, but figured whatever they were, they might grow in my indoor porch. I bought two.

Perceptions of the exotic change with familiarity. When Philip Barker Webb first described the green leaved rosettes that grew on woody stems in 1840, any succulent was considered a novelty. When varieties that had adapted to the intense summer sun with dark burgundy leaves were made available in the early 1980's, they were eagerly grown by desert gardeners in California.

When I grew up, there were hens and chickens in the yard, along with purple leafed barberry. I found nothing unusual about a purple succulent sold to grow in an ordinary garden. What I’ve found odd is another of its environmental adaptations, it grows in winter and rests in summer.

For the first two years the two plants did little more than provide a color contrast with the surrounding aptenia. Last January they must have put out new leaves, bright light green until they matured. For some reason, I took their picture.

Then, for the first time, these coddled plants of civilization faced the crises of their feral ancestors. I forgot to water them in February. They wilted. The porch heater got too ambitious in May. Leaves died. For some unknown reason, one collapsed in August.

Then, on Halloween, I noticed the survivor had started to grow, really grow. By mid-December, it had formed a second rosette on a thinner stem, lower on the splotchy tan stalk. Both rosettes had green centers signifying new leaves.

I hope it’s not preparing to bloom. They can put out long cones of yellow, ten petalled flowers from the centers of the rosettes in late winter, then die.

Like the lion and lamb laying together beneath a veneer of the commonplace, these plants harbor radically different ambitions from their neighbors. Arboreums may behave like woody perennials in a southern California gardens, but in their hearts they’re like annuals intent on a single chance at reproduction and I’m simply a tool for their use.

Notes:
Baldwin, Debra Lee. Designing with Succulents, 2007.

Baldwin, Randy. "Aeonium arboreum 'Zwartkop'," San Marcos Growers website, on Huntington and Ruth Bancroft gardens.

Kim, Seung-Chul, Michael R. McGowen, Pesach Lubinsky, Janet C. Barber, Mark E. Mort and Arnoldo Santos-Guerra. "Timing and Tempo of Early and Successive Adaptive Radiations in Macaronesia," PLoS ONE 3(5):14 May 2008.

Klingaman, Gerald. "Black Tree Aeonium," Arkansas Home and Garden website, 27 June 2008.

Médail, Frédéric and Pierre Quézel. "The Phytogeographical Significance of S. W. Morocco Compared to the Canary Islands," Plant Ecology 140:221-244:1999.

Valido, Alfredo, Yoko L Dupont, and Jens M. Olesen. "Bird-Flower Interactions in the Macaronesian Islands," Journal of Biogeography 31:1945-1953:2004.

Webb, Philip Barker and Sabin Berthelot. Histoire Naturelle des Iles Canaries 3(2,1):185:1840.

Photograph: Aeonium arboreum from the back, where the dead leaves and new branch can clearly be seen, 1 January 2011.

Tree Leaves

What’s happening: The snow brought moisture, and the crust responded; moss in places last Sunday; looks like snow also loosened some rocks which came down into the arroyo; new basal growth on snapdragons Thursday.

What’s still green: Moss, juniper and other evergreens, Apache plume, yuccas, Japanese honeysuckle, pyracantha, grape hyacinth, large-leaved soapwort, sea pink, hollyhock, cheese, oriental poppy, blue flax, yellow and pink evening primroses, vinca, sweet pea, gypsum phacelia, tumble mustard, snakeweed, dandelion, anthemis, coreopsis, chrysanthemum, heath and strap leaf aster leaves; pampas and cheat grasses; rose stems and young chamisa branches.

What’s grey, blue-grey or grey-green: Piñon, four-winged salt bush, buddleia, pinks, snow-in-summer, loco weed, yellow alyssum, stick leaf, western stickseed, winterfat, golden hairy aster leaves.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla, prickly pear, small-leaved soapwort, beards tongues, coral bells leaves.

What’s yellow/turning yellow: Arborvitae; globe and weeping willow branches.

What’s blooming inside: Christmas cactus, aptenia, asparagus fern; chaste tree leaves dead.

Animal sightings: Robin in cottonwood Thursday; rabbit about.

Weather: Ground wet when I got up Wednesday morning, rain Thursday night turned to frost the next morning; 9:45 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: A week ago Friday, one of the men I work with drove in from Pecos with a great, gaping hole in his windshield where a cottonwood branch had come down during the night. Snow and small branches still rode on the roof.

Cottonwoods have relatively soft, weak wood that doesn’t tolerate bending or compression. Ron Smith, of the North Dakota state extension service, calls them "free kindling," because they drop their branches so easily. There currently is a scatter of small, maybe half-inch thick, grey-white branches on the shoulder under a male cottonwood down the road.

One of the things that’s always puzzled me is why some local trees retain their leaves into winter and why those leaves don’t cause more problems for branches when they get wet or collect snow. I remember in Michigan the ice storms of January and February were always accompanied by broken limbs and downed power lines.

When the snow fell last week, my black locusts still had half their leaves, while the catalpa had some on its lowest branch and the cottonwood had scattered leaves near the bottom. Some cottonwoods growing near arroyos kept most of their leaves, while those near the river were bare.

This year the coming of winter in the Española valley has been marked by discrete, widely spaced events. We had our first hard freeze, when temperatures dropped into the high 20's, on October 26. Before that, the leaves on all three species were turning yellow in an orderly manner, but neither the locust nor the catalpa were prepared. The leaves on the one exotic turned dead green, the others brown. The native cottonwoods continued to yellow.

Night temperatures got decidedly colder, 20 on my front porch, on November 10. The cottonwood leaves turned brown.

The first snow moved through on November 16. When I woke the temperature was hovering around 32 and water was condensed on many leaves. I don’t know if we actually got snow, or only very cold moisture. The cottonwoods and catalpas dropped many of their leaves, but the locusts remained the same.

Another storm moved through on November 28, leaving snow in the mountains. High winds stripped my locusts of many of their leaves, especially toward the top. Three days later the morning temperature fell to 10 on my front porch. The remaining locust leaves turned brown.

Last week, the snow started falling just before dark on Thursday and stopped by the time blizzard conditions moved through the open lands between Santa Fé and Albuquerque that night. Pecos was already buried. The temperature was only 32 when I got home Friday night and little had changed except the roads were dry.

Saturday the sun never really broke through the clouds, but the temperature rose into the 40's. Snow either sank into the ground or evaporated into the air. Sunday morning was foggy from the heavy moisture load in the air. By mid afternoon, it was 50 on my front porch and most of the snow was gone.

Ice and leaves behaved the way I expected. On Saturday, evaporating water condensed on my metal roof and fell towards the roses’ drip line where it cooled as it dropped. When it landed on a vertical stem, it simply slid to the ground. When water landed on a leaf on a horizontal branch, it first encased the leaf in ice, then formed icicles which coalesced into elaborate, clear structures. Many rose leaves are now turning brown.

The immediate effect of cold damp wasn’t something I’d ever noticed before. Leaves on many non-woody plants turned black, especially the baptisia, which was never covered, and the purple coneflowers, which were buried. When I walked out towards the arroyo Sunday, I had a sense things were darker, but couldn’t identify any particular plant: it could have been the general wetness or it could have been leaves and stems darkening on some, but not all, individuals of plants like golden hairy asters.

The impact of the snow was less obvious. It tended to collect on lower, horizontal branches facing the storm. Leaves happened to be present on some of those branches that collected snow in my yard, but it was probably because both the leaves and the snow responded to similar wind patterns. The trunks of the trees must deflect the winds which keep leaves in place and allow snow to accumulate.

The weight of the snow did break the final connection between the leaves and the black locusts. By Saturday afternoon, there was a great mess of leaflets lying atop the snow. On the prairie, it looks like one cottonwood branch snapped, one that still retained its leaves. All the other downed wood looked old, long ago bleached and stripped of any signs of life.

The reason the leaves survived so long seems to be related to location as much as species. Botanists tell us plants respond to water stress and lower fall temperatures by slowing photosynthesis and producing abscisic acid, a hormone that seals the joints between leaves and stems so dead leaves can fall. If those biochemical messages are absent or contradictory, the plant is less likely to adapt to the changing season.

The cottonwoods growing on the relatively dry land back from the river near the city had no leaves this week, and the ground below was littered with long dead branches no one had cleared. Nothing looked like a new fall.

The cottonwood that lost its branch was growing in a gully cut by water leaving the end of an irrigation ditch for the arroyo. The tree that still has its leaves near the village sprouted in the run off of another irrigation ditch which has since dug a trench around the tree, exposing its roots. The arroyos kept running after the natural environment began to dry last fall, apparently countermanding any stress messages.

In my yard, the cottonwood is protected by a wooden fence on two sides, north and east. The surviving leaves are below the top of the fence towards the center of the tree. The locusts are close enough to the house, that the building may slow the wind near the ground where leaves still exist, while the leafy end of catalpa branch is less than 2' above the warmer ground.

The effect of piles of snow seems less important to trees than either damp or ice, which combines the weight of snow with the cold moisture. However, species seems more important than location. The locust shrugs off loosened leaves, while the cottonwood breaks from too much pressure.

Notes:
Smith, Ron. "Questions on Cottonwood," North Dakota State University extension website.

Taylor, Jennifer L. "Populus deltoides," 2001, in United States Forest Service, on-line Fire Effects Information System.

Photograph: Cottonwood growing in a gully carved by an irrigation ditch, with a leaf laden broken branch, 24 December 2010.

Russian Thistle

What’s happening: Ice forming on roses in the back drip line; most of the blackberry lily seeds have disappeared.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens, some Apache plume, yuccas, some Japanese honeysuckle, pyracantha, red hot poker, grape hyacinth, Jupiter’s beard, large-leaved soapwort, sea pink, hollyhock, oriental poppy, blue flax, yellow and pink evening primroses, vinca, gypsum phacelia, tumble mustard, snakeweed, dandelion, anthemis, coreopsis, perky Sue, Shasta daisy, black-eyed Susan, strap leaf aster leaves; June, pampas, brome, cheat and base of needle grasses; rose stems and young chamisa branches.

What’s grey, blue-grey or grey-green: Piñon, four-winged salt bush, buddleia, pinks, snow-in-summer, loco weed, yellow alyssum, stick leaf, western stickseed, winterfat, golden hairy aster leaves.

What’s red/turning red: Privet, cholla, prickly pear, small-leaved soapwort, beards tongues, coral bells leaves.

What’s yellow/turning yellow: Arborvitae; globe and weeping willow branches.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: The night after the snow fell a mouse was on my kitchen counter after I went to bed looking for food.

Weather: First snow Thursday; returned as fog this morning; 9:45 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Tuesday morning I could smell wood smoke when I walked out to my car. Across the river I could see dark smoke rising from someone burning. I’m not a good enough woodsmen to recognize the burning wood, but I can often tell when some one’s firing Russian thistle.

Most weeds produce a grey-white smoke. When Russian thistles ignite, which they do with a great whoosh, the smoke turns dark, with a touch of fatty yellow. The fumes are so acrid they attack my throat and make it difficult to breathe. My hair reeks until it’s washed.

When it grows in saline environments, Salsola tragus sequesters the salt it absorbs in vacuole sacs in its leaves. When it burns, the sodium is converted to carbonate of soda. If the soil is more normal, the alkaline ashes instead contain a carbonate of potash, itself a form of potassium.

Na₂CO₃, better known as washing soda, is used to bleach linen, for making soap and as the flux is manufacturing glass. The origins of glass making are lost in prehistory: Roman tradition gave credit to the Phoenicians, while the earliest evidence of a fully realized industry has been recovered from iron age Tell Amarna in Egypt dated around 1350 bc. The latter used soda from Lake Natron, while people living along the modern Syrian coast are the ones credited with discovering how to extract the compound from seaside plants.

The Romans mass produced glass, especially in Sidon in modern Lebanon where someone introduced glass blowing during the time of Augustus (31 bc–14 ad). The Romans later took glass making to Valencia and Murcia in Spain, areas conquered by the Umayyads of Syria in 714.

By the time Renaissance industrial demand increased, farmers around Cartagena in Murcia and Alacant on the Valencian coast planted barrilla, which was burned in pits covered with earth where the sodium carbonate had to be broken from the walls with hammers.

The most likely plants used by the Spanish were Salsola soda, Salsola kali, and Salsola sativa, now classed as Halogeton sativus.

The idea of burning the annual chenopods spread north to France where Salsola kali and our Russian thistle, there called soude épineuse or thorny soda, were used to produce blanquette around Montpellier, between Frontignan and Aiguemortes. The plants weren’t seeded like they were in Spain, but were burned in heaps in trenches for 8 or 9 days in late summer. The soda formed an "adhesive, almost vitreous mass" that remained red hot. When the blanquette cooled, it hardened and turned black. Water was then used to extract it from the residue.

The best always came from the Levant and was used to produce the clear cristallo glass made for Venice at Murano. The soda from Spain produced a bluish glass, while that from France was greenish.

The demand for organic sources for glass making declined after Nicolas Leblanc patented a process to produce sodium carbonate from salt, sulfuric acid, limestone and coal in 1791. In 1861, Ernest Solvay substituted ammonia for the acid. Mass production and a taste for large windows followed.

However, the need to burn weeds persisted. People here don’t burn Russian thistles because of some ties to a coastal Spain they never knew, nor have then reinvented something in the face of recurring circumstances. Instead, burning’s a relic from the time before the Phoenicians when the transformative power of fire was culturally important for both pragmatic and philosophical reasons.

Glass is a pyramid of fires. Natural glass is formed when fire heats the underlying sand to produce obsidian. The soda that lowers the melting temperature comes from burning weeds. The lime that stabilizes the soda-silica compound often comes from burning shells or limestone. Man-made glass forms when quartz granules are burned with soda and lime.

Science has demystified fire by calling it heat. Urban life and, more recently, anti-burning ordinances have done much to eliminate fire from our inherited tool kit, but it persists here in the Española valley in the varieties of smoke that greet one in the morning.

Burning is still a primordial ritual that inspires fear when thistles ignite, even if the curiosity to rake through the ashes has been lost.

Notes: Glass color doesn’t come from the soda, but from mineral impurities or additives in the mix.

Chaptal, Jean-Antoine-Claude. "Blanquette" in Chemistry Applied to Arts and Manufactures, volume 2, 1807.

Guibourt, Nicolas Jean Baptiste Gaston. Work near Cherbourg published in Journal de Chimie Medicale in March 1840 and reported as "Analysis of the Ashes of the Salsola tragus" in The London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, July 1840.

Kauffman, C. H. "Barilla" in The Dictionary of Merchandise, and Nomenclature in All Languages, 1805.

Nesbitt, Alexander and Henry James Powell. "History of Glass Manufacture" in Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911.

Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus). Naturalis Historia, translated by John F. Healy as Natural History: A Selection, 1991.

Photograph: Russian thistle just after it ignited in the gathering mist before the snow, 16 December 2010; winterfat in back is not burning; all the flame and smoke are from a single plant.

Russian Olive

What’s happening: Cold dry mornings have been killing off many leaves that remained; rose leaves, some junipers and the edges of some prickly pears bronzing; gumweed seeds disappearing.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens, Apache plume, yuccas, Japanese honeysuckle, pyracantha, red hot poker, grape hyacinth, Jupiter’s beard, large-leaved soapwort, sea pink, snapdragon, hollyhock, oriental poppy, blue flax, yellow and pink evening primroses, vinca, gypsum phacelia, tumble mustard, snakeweed, dandelion, anthemis, some coreopsis, perky Sue, Shasta daisy, some black-eyed Susan, strap leaf aster leaves; June, pampas, brome, cheat and base of needle grasses; young chamisa branches.

What’s grey, blue-grey or grey-green: Piñon, four-winged salt bush, buddleia, pinks, snow-in-summer, loco weed, yellow alyssum, stick leaf, western stickseed, winterfat, Silver King artemisia, golden hairy aster leaves.

What’s red/turning red: Privet, rose, cholla, prickly pear, small-leafed soapwort, beards tongues, coral bells leaves.

What’s yellow/turning yellow: Arborvitae; globe and weeping willow branches.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Now that leaves have fallen, I can see several birds' nests in my neighbor’s apricot, the one near the road with a number of vertical branches that grew after it was pruned.

Weather: Cold morning temperatures are earlier than usual; last rain 10/21/10; 9:47 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: If I took the number of volunteer plants in my yard as an indicator, then the birds in this area prefer the berries of Virginia creeper and Russian olive over all others.

Hawks Aloft found, when it monitored birds in the bosque between Rio Rancho and Los Lunas for the Corps of Engineers between 2003 and 2008, that the Russian olive, so disparaged by environmentalists for filling the void left by the disappearing cottonwoods, is actually filling a much larger hole for migrating birds whose habitats are vanishing with suburban development. The highest densities and greatest diversity of species in winter were found in pure stands of Elaeagnus angustifolia.

The native of the collision belt between the Eurasian continent and the more southerly plates begins leafing the middle of April. The four-lobed tubular flowers appear a month later on branches they have lengthened from buds formed the previous year. However, you only know because you can smell them. The small pale yellow clusters are hidden by umbrellas of narrow, grey leaves on reddish twigs covered with grey scales.

Last year I saw incised fruits on my tree the first of July. They were gone before the end of summer. The tree in the wide arroyo produced small, round grey-green olives the middle of July that were disappearing by the end of September.

Unlike many deciduous trees whose leaves turn color, then drop, Russian olive leaves seem to just dry in late September and fold into narrow pendants that won’t hold ice or snow if the weather turns bad prematurely and make the ripening berries more visible. If they’re not eaten, the polished tan berries can last until late winter, when they begin to shrivel.

Hawks Aloft found many birds ignored them in the fall, if there was a large sunflower crop. However, neo-tropical animals like Wilson’s Warbler and the Western Tanager ate the berries, as did migrating robins, hermit thrushes, and white crowned and song sparrows.

The fruit continues to age during the cold, when it’s more important for birds wintering in the bosque. For instance, Stellar’s Jay was there in 2008 when the cone crop was less plentiful at higher elevations. Eastern blue birds have become permanent residents. Others that eat the fruit in the shortened days include western and mountain blue birds, both types of sparrows, American robins, red-winged blackbirds, northern flickers, hermit thrushes, yellow-rumped warblers, spotted towhees, and dark-eyed juncos.

Russian olives continue to be important in spring, when little new has appeared in the landscape. Of the 18 vegetation communities observed by Hawks Aloft from 63 locations, the nitrogen fixing members of the oleaster family attracted the second highest density of terrestrial birds, and were particularly important to cedar waxwings. In other parts of the country, those birds eat pyracantha berries in fall.

Where I live is close enough to the river to hear migrating geese in the morning and see occasional flocks overhead, but too far away to attract visitors. Occasionally a robin will appear in late May, usually near the orchards and open fields near the village.

The orchards provide both the remains of previous crops and large swaths of non-native grasses, like smooth brome, with all the seeds, insects and worms they bring. They also have no dogs, infrequent human visitors, and cars that are a goodly distance away.

This spring was unusual. Robins seemed to have started out earlier than usual, then were forced to lay over in this less than optimal area. I saw one along the side of the main road in February, when I was also hearing water fowl. The end of the month, I saw larger numbers around the orchards.

The middle of March, some had moved two miles south to my uphill neighbor’s yard, especially the area where the previous owner had kept horses. The end of the month, two small birds were in my catalpa. The next day one was in the peach next to my house. In mid April, there was one in the cottonwood between the catalpa and the old paddock. I last saw a robin in a front yard orchard on the main road the end of May.

Meantime, I saw some unusual slate-blue colored birds with brighter, darker heads on May 2 in the still barren Russian olives that line a lot next to the other, narrower arroyo that has the remains of some kind of lawn. I don’t know if those trees still had berries - it’s much harder to see such things in someone else’s yard - but this fall they have large fruits, while my tree and the one in the wide arroyo produced nothing this summer.

The skin color has faded to bleached wood. Most still have pockmarked surfaces, but the sides of some are becoming smooth and glisten in the sun. When one’s plucked, the short stem snaps, but the fruit resists pressure. However, when it’s broken, the outer skin is as pliable as an orange peel. The layer between the rind and the large seed has begun to dessicate: the mesocarp crumbles in the fruits that have begun to turn golden, is a bit more adhesive in the less mature ones.

At this time, the fructose and glucose are concentrated in the rind, but the drying pulp still has some flavor. When Steve Brill bit into a ripe fruit, he said "it tasted great - like a sweet raisin - for the first five seconds. Then it seemed like I had a mouthful of talcum powder."

Local birds, like the smallish brown ones that moved into my eastern neighbor’s metal building, have no problems eating the mealy drupes. A tree is now growing at the corner of his barn, and I suspect that that tree is the source of all the seedlings I removed from areas near the utility line this spring.

Whether or not natural selection is purely random or has purposefully favored the trees that support symbiotic birds is a philosophical, perhaps even a theological question. What’s obvious is that the large, striped seeds obviously aren’t damaged by their middle passage.

Notes: Thanks to an anonymous friend who was willing to taste the separate parts of a berry.

Brill, Steve. Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants, 1994, with illustrations by Evelyn Dean.

Hawks Aloft, Albuquerque. Bird and Vegetation Community Relationships in the Middle Rio Grande Bosque: 2008 Interim Report, May 2009.

Photograph: Russian olive berries on a tree near the narrow arroyo, 5 December, 2010; the joint between this year’s growth and last is clear with the change in branch color; buds for next year’s growth and the dried tear drop leaves are also visible.