Tahoka Daisy

What’s blooming: Snapdragon, large-leaf globemallow, chrysanthemums, blanket flower, áñil del muerto, tahoka daisy, gum weed, purple, heath and golden hairy asters; Virginia creeper and pyracantha still have berries; new seed head on dandelion; hollyhock capsules opening to release seeds; broom senecio and chamisa releasing seeds; black grama grass seed heads curving.

What’s still green: Arborvitae, juniper and other evergreens, Siberian elm, globe willow, apples, roses, Willamette raspberry, forsythia, privet, Japanese honeysuckle, pyracantha, cholla, prickly pear, yuccas, red hot poker, hostas, grape hyacinth, west-facing iris, hollyhock, winecup, oriental poppy, St. John’s wort, vinca, bindweed, oxalis, baptisia, purple and white sweet clovers, alfalfa, sweet pea, catmint, pink salvia, coral and red beardtongues, soapworts, Jupiter’s beard, sea pink, golden spur columbine, scarlet flax, Hartweg, yellow and pink evening primroses, tomatillo, snakeweed, perky Sue, Shasta daisy, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, anthemis, Mönch asters, yarrow, dandelion, pampas, brome, and cheat grasses, base of needle grass; new growth on stick leaf, alfilerillo and tumble mustard; dead leaves still on trees.

What’s grey, blue-grey or grey-green: Piñon, four-winged salt bush, buddleia, pinks, snow-in-summer, yellow alyssum, California poppies, donkey tail spurge, winterfat, chamisa, Silver King artemisia, chocolate flower; new growth on loco weed; Russian olive dropping leaves.

What’s turned/turning red: Red leaved plum, sand cherries, Bradford pear, spirea, snowball, barberry, coral bells, purple beardtongue, prostrate knotweed, lambs quarter, goldenrod leaves; Russian thistle stems.

What’s turned/turning yellow: Cottonwood, tamarix, weeping willow, apricot, rugosa and pasture roses, Apache plume, lilacs, beauty bush, garlic chives, Autumn Joy sedum, lady bells, bouncing Bess, David phlox, Rumanian sage, blue flax, purple ice plant, tansy, Maximilian sunflower, purple coneflowers, June grass; peach and caryopteris dropping leaves.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, pomegranate, zonal geranium..

Animal sightings: Rabbit, cabbage and sulfur butterflies, wasps, grasshoppers, carpenter and small red ants have new hills in asphalt someone dumped around the corner.

Weather: Temperatures below freezing most mornings; snow visible in Sangre de Cristo; last rain 10/21/10; 10:34 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Tahoka daisies are plains wild flowers that range from Alberta down into central Mexico, with their greatest concentration in west Texas, eastern New Mexico and nearby Oklahoma.

The showy composite blooms all summer, and thus was easily noticed by men documenting the flora of North America in the nineteenth century. Their collections were often analyzed by others who recorded little about growing conditions. Aimé Bonpland collected Machaeranthera tanaecetifolia in central Mexico when he was there with Alexander von Humboldt in 1803 and 1804. He took 60,000 specimens back to Europe which Carl Kunth cataloged.

Thomas Nuttall noticed them when he was exploring the west in the 1830's, but didn’t publish his findings until 1841. John Torrey collected them on an expedition looking for the best rail route through the west in the 1850's, but they weren’t included in the list of plants by location made by Thomas Antisell. Charles Parry led two easterners on a collecting expedition in the Rockies in 1862 where they found 600 species that were described by Asa Gray the next year.

Early in the twentieth century, Elmer Wooten and Paul Standley claimed they could be found on sandy soil throughout New Mexico “at lower altitudes.” Today the USDA map shows them growing in most counties in the state except those immediately east of the northern Sangre de Cristo and those east and west of Albuquerque.

For being so widespread, they don’t seem to like this area very much. It may be too dry or too hot. Gray says the taproots like “moist ground.” Ann Reilly warns gardeners they prefer “cool climates.” The ones I saw blooming last Sunday were either growing in the bottom of the big arroyo or along the side of a road shaded by cottonwoods that leads to the narrow arroyo.

They got their common name when Mrs. Myrick persuaded an Iowa seed company to offer seeds in the 1920's. She lived in Lubbock, Texas, and associated them with nearby Tahoka, an atypical staked plains town built on the shores of a permanent lake fed by three springs.

Many say they like disturbed ground. When Effie Alley first saw them at the new Tahoka Lake Ranch in 1889, the area had already been grazed by buffalo and sheep. The ones in my yard stick to shaded areas along the edge of a gravel drive, and don’t migrate into the nearby irrigated garden soil.

According to Reilly the flat seeds, shaped like ecru-colored sunflower kernels, need two weeks of wet cold, before they can be moved into a medium that’s kept at 70 degrees for 25 to 30 days. When they meet those conditions here varies by year: in 2007 I noticed some early leaves in mid March; last year it was the middle of May.

When they first break ground, the seedlings look like tansy mustard, a bit grey with narrow leaves that appear dissected. When you look closely, you see a central corridor with narrow, smooth edged segments curving away. At the tip is a tiny spine that can only be seen, but not felt. If you try to pick the leaves to look, the stem resists and your fingers smell.

In a few weeks they turn bright green. The central stem produces multiple branches which soon form a short, rounded, bush. My largest this year grew 29" high and spread 3' at the top. The base of the primary stalk was half an inch across, while the four larger branches, which diverged about 4.5" from the soil, grew to a quarter inch across. Each branch first sprouted thin twigs that held only leaves, then branched and rebranched until buds appeared at the tips of every leafy branch, often at the end of Y’s.

Blooming is as variable as germination. I’ve seen them the middle May, and haven’t noticed them until July. However, the tight buds don’t really unfold until after the monsoons. Even then, the terminal flowers they don’t all open flat at once. More often, the plant is covered with shuttlecocks of exterior petals lost in ferny foliage.

The 15 to 25 ray flowers apparently exist only to make pollen and attract insects. Bees produce a “dark honey resembling something very much like molasses in both taste and smell” when they visit the corollas.

The tubular yellow disk flowers, with their five points, are more important. They’re the ones that survive as sandy-white feathery plumes, the pappi, above the seeds. Around September 22 this year, the bushes were covered with white balls that captured light like crystal ornaments.

Now the seeds are being released to the wind, leaving white cushions where receptacles had held the petals. Fringes of dead bracts hang down. The reddish stems have turned to wood. Last week they began breaking at the ground, further scattering the seed’s parachutes.

While the annual has signaled the completion of its life cycle with those pockmarked cushions, not all were killed by last week’s frost. Some continue to produce a few, tentative flowers to remind passers-by of what was and will be again when the weather’s as favorable as this year.

Notes:
Gray, Asa. “Enumeration of the Species of Plants Collected by Dr. C. C. Parry, and Messrs. Elihu Hall and J. P. Harbour, during the Summer and Autumn of 1862, on and near the Rocky Mountains, in Colorado Territory, lat. 39°-41°,” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia Proceedings 15:55-80:1863.

_____ and Sereno Watson. Synoptical Flora of North America: Gamopetalae, 1884; on moist ground.

Hill, Frank P. and Pat Hill Jacobs. Grassroots Upside Down: A History of Lynn County, quoted on Tahoka, Texas, website, on Tahoka daisy.

Kunth, Carl Sigismund. Nova Genera et Species Plantarum quas in Peregrinatione ad Plagam Aequinoctialem Orbis Novi Collegerunt Bonpland et Humboldt 4:95:1820.

Nuttall, Thomas. “Descriptions of New Species and Genera of Plants in the Natural Order of the Compositae, Collected in a Tour Across the Continent to the Pacific, a Residence in Oregon and a Visit to the Sandwich Islands and Upper California, During the Years 1834 and 1835,” American Philosophical Society Transactions 7:283-454:1841.

Reilly, Ann. Park’s Success with Seeds, 1978.

Scribner, David D. “Honey Bee FAQs,” Niche Development website, 2007; same words appear on other web sites.

Torrey, John. Botanical Report from the Explorations and Surveys for a Railroad Route from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean project, 1856; includes table by Thomas Antisell.

United States Department of Agriculture. Natural Resources Conservation Service. Plant profile for Machaeranthera tanaecetifolia, available on-line.

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

Photograph: Tahoka daisy with seed head growing along my drive on the north side of a wooden fence, 31 October 2010; a bare receptacle and bracts can be seen behind them.

Western Sand Cherry

What’s blooming in the area: Apples, chokecherry, flowering quince, other pink and white trees, tulips, iris, tansy and purple mustards, hoary cress, alyssum simplex, western stickseed, mossy phlox, golden smoke, oxalis, fernleaf globemallow, dandelion, three-awn grass; buds on wisteria; people preparing their vegetable gardens.

What’s coming out: Some cottonwoods in green haze, silver lace vine, spiny lettuce.

What’s blooming in my yard: Bradford pear, Rome apple, sour cherry, purple-leaved plum, peach, purple-leaved and western sand cherries, forsythia, daffodil, grape hyacinth, hyacinth, baby blue iris, vinca, yellow alyssum; buds on spirea and lilacs.

What’s coming out: Dr. Huey rose, cherry leaves, beauty bush, snowball, privet, tamarix, hosta, sea lavender, pied snapdragon, purple ice plant, Hartweig’s primrose, purple coneflower, yarrows, Mönch aster.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia.

Animal sightings: Small hummingbird, gecko, bees, small red and large black ants.

Weather: Storms moved through the area all week, but didn’t leave any rain until Thursday night; 13:31 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Fragrance is rare in my yard. The only times I smell flowers are early in the morning when the air is still damp. Then they are ones with powerful scents like sweet alyssum, chocolate flower, and hyacinth.

Some spring mornings I catch something that seems to be wafting up from the river, but I never can locate it. This year I realized the mystery plant had to be in my yard: when I walked out to the road, I could no longer smell it.

The only possibility is the clump of western sand cherries growing amongst the winterfat along the drive that have been blooming since the middle of the month. However, if I approach them there’s no sweet aroma. I can only detect it if I stand at a distance, and the wind’s blowing from the west.

The five-petaled flowers, dominated by fans of yellow-tipped stamens, never photograph well. No matter the time of day or weather conditions, my camera simply cannot see them. Last Saturday, I finally got one clear picture, and thought this is the moment. I stayed still, took another which was the usual blur. The third try was worse, a white blob.

I walked away thinking, it’s like those clusters knew I was there and deliberately sent out energy to blind my camera. Now, this is the kind of thought that comes to you, if you spend too much time around plants, but if you’ve been properly socialized, you know enough not to share it with others.

The Cheyenne used the same root word, muuh koo taa, for the red-branched shrub and for easily spooked game. They told George Grinnell, "if the scent of a human being reaches them," the taste of the dark-skinned fruits "is spoiled, hence they must always be picked from the leeward side."

The Dakota told Melvin Gilmore the half-inch cherries are sweet if you approach them against the wind, but are bitter and astringent if you move with the wind. Their name, aonyeyapi, carries the same meaning as the Cheyenne.

Kathleen Keeler wonders if the anomalous fleshy fruit surrounding an indigestible pit is some vestigial survival from the time before the glaciers when large mammals were the ones who disbursed seeds that need at least 120 days of cold, wet weather to germinate. Since they’re now extinct, we have no idea what odor or taste attracted them.

The sweet smelling flowers would normally suggest adaptions to attract bees, but last weekend the bees surrounded the peach and yesterday were on the Siberian pea. Smaller insects and a few stray bees were on the sand cherries. The identity of Pleistocene pollinators, when many bees had retreated to the tropics, is one of those lost plant-animal interactions that interest Keeler.

The members of the rose family may be too sensitive to the potential danger humans present. When settlers moved into Nebraska and South Dakota, men like Gilmore transplanted the better tasting shrubs to their gardens where they became larger and bore more fruit.

Tony Reznicek was intrigued by a patch of land near Holland Landing, Ontario, on the ancient Indian trail from modern Toronto to New Georgian Bay that was an island of prairie plants, including Prunus besseyi, surrounded by a modern forest.

He believes it might have survived from the warm period that followed the Wisconsin glacier some 7000 years ago when Lake Algonquin was receding to leave Lake Huron and groups still traveled its shores. He thinks the natives deliberately kept the area clear for camping, probably with fires.

My plants came from a nursery in glacier scraped northwestern Ohio in 2001, and have thrived despite the hostile New Mexico environment. They normally bear clusters of fruit in three years, but mine didn’t produce until 2007 and then disappeared before I could taste them. The roots have spread along the irrigation hose and produced new suckers that have reached 40", a good height for the greying trunks.

All our theories, mine, the Cheyenne and Dakota, Keller and Reznicek, are the kind that are hard to demonstrate to rational scientists who don’t ascribe malignant intent to plants. After Darwin, traits like variable taste are simply genes to be bred away and the past just that, past.

Notes:Bessey, Charles. "Some Wild Fruits Which Ought To Be Cultivated," Nebraska State Horticultural Society, Annual Report, 43:55-56:1912, on Gilmore.

Gilmore, Melvin Randolph. Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region, 1919.

Grinnell, George Bird. The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Ways of Life, 1928, reprinted by Bison Books, 1972.

Grisez, Ted J. "Prunus L. Cherry, Peach, and Plum," in USDA Forest Service, Seeds of Woody Plants in the United States, 1974, on germination requirements.

Keeler, Kathleen. "Influence of Past Interactions on the Prairie Today: A Hypothesis," Great Plains Research 10:107-125:2000.

Reznicek, A. A. "Association of Relict Prairie Flora with Indian Trials in Central Ontario,"
North American Prairie Conference, Proceedings, 1982.

Photograph: Western sand cherry in front of winterfat, 17 April 2010.

Heath Aster

What’s blooming in the area: Tamarix, tea roses, Apache plume, butterfly bush, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, leather leaved globemallow, alfalfa, white sweet clovers, white and yellow evening primroses, datura, Heavenly Blue and ivy-leaf morning glory, scarlet creeper, bindweed, goats’ head, bouncing Bess, pale trumpet, stickleaf, clammy weed, spurge, pigweed, Russian thistle, winterfat, ragweed, snakeweed, native and farmer’s sunflowers, áñil del muerto, Hopi tea, horseweed, wild lettuce, purple, heath, strap-leaf and hairy golden asters, goldenrod, tahokia daisy; bittersweet berries, apples falling.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Zucchini, nasturtium, Mexican hat almost gone, chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan almost gone, chrysanthemum.

Looking east: California poppy, hollyhock almost gone, winecup, snapdragons, Jupiter’s beard, large-leaved soapwort, Autumn Joy sedum darkening, garlic chive, Maximilian sunflower.

Looking south: Blaze roses, rose of Sharon, sweet pea, Crimson Rambler and reseeded morning glories, zinnia, cosmos.

Looking west: Caryopteris, Russian sage, catmint, calamintha, flax, sea lavender, David phlox, leadwort, perennial four o’clock, purple ice plant, Silver King artemisia, purple coneflower, Mönch aster.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum.

Inside: South African aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbird, geckos, bees, wasps, grasshoppers, large black harvester ants, explosion of small dark ants

Weather: Rain Wednesday and Thursday; mornings were cold enough for the furnace to come on and my neighbor to fire up his chain saw to cut fire wood; 12:15 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Mornings turn cold, heath asters open, and my thoughts turn to Billy Grammer. In 1959 he sang "summer’s almost gone, winter’s coming on."

Grammer’s answer was it’s time to travel on. That’s good advice for hummingbirds raiding the last hollyhocks, but what about the bees and wasps and other insects still flitting about?

My bees probably come from some hive maintained down by the orchards, and will survive the winter by clustering together and beating their wings to produce enough heat to keep themselves warm. The six-legged creatures only venture out when temperatures rise above 50, so will subsist on stored honey.

Other bee species and wasps have no such surplus. The social wasps, and hornets that are part of that insect group, spent the summer feeding larvae with animal proteins from insects they had killed, including ones that would have eaten the leaves or sucked the juices from my wild asters. The adults themselves lived on sugars and got some nutrients from the process of feeding the grubs, some from flowers, and some from foraging in garbage.

Now the larvae are grown and everyone needs to eat. In some species, the young females will impregnate themselves and burrow under leaves or find an attic to hibernate for the winter. Others will simply lay eggs which remain dormant until spring. The rest, the workers, will die.

Unfortunately, they all need food just when most flowering plants are responding to nature’s signals that winter’s coming on by moving to seed production. Wasps don’t have the specialized tongues of bees and need open, shallow autumn flowers where nectar is easily available. They must have had a tough time this past week when the white asters pulled up their twelve ray flowers to shed the rain.

The small, white composites, like many related asters, seem to have two growth cycles related to changes in light. The basal rosettes emerged this year in late April, but the tall plumes of narrow green leaves didn’t appear until late July, nearly six weeks after the long days of mid-summer stimulated their production. It wasn’t until the shorter days of fall that the flower clusters were ready to open.

With so little time to produce seed and visitations by smooth wasps, who aren’t as efficient at pollinating as hairy bees, heath asters have found others way to perpetuate themselves. Every spring I remember how the skinny stalks turn into a hedge that overshadows everything before smothering the lower plants when they collapse. I pull out most of the plants, but strands of their stolonous roots break off.

After the heat of summer drives me inside, the perennials spread underground and push up new shoots back near the water and paths. By then, it’s too late to do anything except plan how to control them the next year.

Man has found little use for Aster ericoides. Some call it steel weed because the woody brown stems dull their tools; others call it good-bye meadow because it’s poor forage. Only the Meskwaki used it to their lash together their sweat lodges and tested its herbal uses.

The seeds, if they get produced, can last several years. Heath asters are one of the first things to return in tall grass prairies when fields are abandoned. They dominate the land for a few years, then succumb to competition from other plants, including the grasses. When they bloom, they stretch from Manitoba to northern Mexico and provide a nectar path for migrating monarch butterflies, as well as a steady diet for the more sedentary silvery checkerspots.

These are precious weeks when life is suspended between summer and winter. Heath asters may attract stinging insects, but they have no inhibitions about blooming until frost. We can’t all travel on. Those of us who stay around, deserve our pleasures too.

Notes:Clayton, Paul. "Gotta Travel On;" Bob Colton discusses the origins of the song in Paul Clayton and the Folksong Revival, 2008.

Hilty, John. "Heath Aster," Illinois Wildflowers website has more details on insects.

Smith, Huron H. "Ethnobotany of the Meskwaki Indians," Public Museum of the City of Milwaukee Bulletin 4:175-326:1928, cited by Dan Moerman, Native American Ethnobotany, 1998.

Photograph: Heath aster with wasp on cloudy day, 16 September 2009; brown sweet pea pods in back.

Coral Beardtongue

What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, Apache plume, rose of Sharon, hedgehog cactus, yucca, buddleia, Russian sage, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, purple phlox, bigleaf globemallow, white sweet clover, alfalfa, oxalis, milkwort, velvetweed, white and yellow evening primroses, scarlet beeblossom, stickleaf, goat head, silver-leaf nightshade, bindweed, buffalo gourd, zinnia, cosmos, purple coneflower, wild lettuce, horseweed, local dandelion, Hopi tea, hairy golden aster, plains paper flower; farmers, garden, and plains sunflowers; catalpa pods lengthening; corn beginning to form.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartweig, butterfly weed, yellow flax, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, coreopsis, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat; buds on perky Sue.

Looking east: Large-leaf soapwort, bouncing Bess, snow-in-summer, coral bells, ipomopsis, tomatillo, California poppy, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, pink savlia, pink speedwell, rock rose, pink evening primrose, Jupiter’s beard; buds on cutleaf coneflower, sedum, and garlic chives.

Looking south: Blaze, tamarix, Illinois bundle flower, sweet pea, daylily; rugosa rose hips forming.

Looking west: Catmint, ladybells, perennial four o’clock, flax, speedwell, purple ice plant, white spurge, sea lavender, Shasta daisy; buds on caryopteris and Monch aster.

Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, petunia, moss rose, Dahlberg daisy, French marigold, gazania.

Inside: Aptenia, bougainvillea, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, swallowtail butterfly, dragonfly, squash bug, grasshoppers, ants, bees.

Weather: Afternoon clouds, with their high winds, actually dumped rain several nights; morning temperatures still fell to 60; 15:30 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Hummingbirds are a bit like cats. They seem to know the people who don’t want them and elect to torment them.

This past weekend, their number increased dramatically around the house, perhaps because the young were beginning to feed. Usually five weeks pass after a mother lays two eggs before the fledglings begin foraging. I first saw a pair of small birds about six weeks earlier on May 20th.

Once the young can fend for themselves, the females may mate again. In the past week at least one pair has been darting about, often diving within a few feet of where I’m standing, unseen but sensed by their sound and changing air currents.

Many of my neighbors keep red plastic feeders. When they ask me if I feed the birds I say no, but with my fingers crossed behind my back. The birds have sown their own food and, because coral beardtongues are attractive, I let them be.

I first planted Penstemon barbatus in 1995 with no luck. I tried them again in 1996 in a different location where they held on, but didn’t increase. I added more the next two years, but didn’t see any evidence they had settled until 1999. Around 2002 they appeared on the north side of the house among the tiles and since have colonized that scree environment.

Andrea Wolfe and her confreres used DNA to confirm Penstemons evolved in the Rocky Mountains, and spread from there to the southwest, probably adapting to conditions created when the glaciers retreated in the Pleistocene. Scarlet Bugler grows west of the New Mexico continental divide, and along the Rio Grand north from Albuquerque and to the northeast. The 6000' Española valley is at the low end of its preferred range between 6000 and 9600 feet.

Despite their origin in commercial production, my plants have maintained their alpine habits. Not only can the grayish stalks withstand severe winds without bending or breaking, without becoming stunted or dessicated, the perennials retain their leaves in winter. The basal rosettes turn purplish-red when photosynthesis slows and the bluish-green fades.

Penstemons, as a group within the snapdragon family, have been particularly sensitive to the needs of their pollinators, converting from bees to hummingbirds at least ten times. Coral beardtongues have lengthened and narrowed their flower funnels, and reconfigured their lower lips so they don’t provide landing platforms for insects.

The flowers stay in bloom for months, even if the color fades a little: last year they persisted until mid-September, the year before the end of August. Unlike many flowers which immediately convert to seed production, these refill their nectaries and replenish the pollen so hummingbirds can continue feeding and pollinating. However, they keep the food levels low so the animals must dart from stalk to stalk.

I assume this is less a sensitivity to the needs of birds than a reproductive strategy by a plant that can’t fertilize itself. What seed it produces in its hard, sharp cases can be erratic: it not only needs cold winters, but Scott Abella found exposure to ponderosa smoke helps. Before my plants naturalized there was the Cerro Grande fire of 2000 followed by a snowy winter and forest fires in Arizona the following summer which I could smell for a week.

Coral beardtongues are native plants that can grow in gardens in many parts of the country, but there they are maintained by cuttings. It was only when nature, abetted by the birds and man-made fires, could reproduce ancestral conditions that my plants went from choice specimens to genuine wildflowers that could sustain themselves and hummingbirds unaided.

Notes: I suspect the birds are black-chinned hummingbirds. However, the ones I see have the limited coloring of females and juveniles that make it difficult to be sure of species.

Abella Scott R. “Effects of Smoke and Fire-related Cues on Penstemon barbatus Seeds," The American Midland Naturalist 155:404-410:2006.

Lange, Ronald S., Summer A. Scobell, and Peter E. Scott. “Hummingbird-Syndrome Traits, Breeding System, and Pollinator Effectiveness in Two Syntopic Penstemon Species,” International Journal of Plant Sciences 161:253-263:2000.

Newfield, Nancy L. and Barbara Nielsen. “Black-Chinned Hummingbird” in Hummingbird Gardens: Attracting Nature's Jewels, 1996.

Wolfe, Andrea D., Christopher P. Randle, Shannon L. Datwyler, Jeffery J. Morawetz, Nidia Arguedas, and Jose Diaz. “Phylogeny, Taxonomic Affinities, and Biogeography of Penstemon (Plantaginaceae) Based on ITS and cpDNA Sequence Data,” American Journal of Botany 2006;93:1699-1713.

Photograph: If anyone ever doubted nature’s perverse joy in refusing to replicate scientific findings, yesterday a swallowtail was feeding on my coral beardtongues while the hummingbirds swooned through.

Hairy Golden Aster

What’s growing in the area: Honeysuckle, bittersweet and arborvitae are greener. New growth on snakeweed. Down the road Russian thistles that were piled, but not burned before last Sunday’s winds, are now spread across nearby fences. Two men were cleaning a ditch in the village yesterday. Seeds, bare root roses, and the first trees and shrubs were available in one hardware yesterday; the other local store has had seeds for several weeks.

In my yard: Reseeded garlic chives are up. Maltese cross and cutleaf coneflower are putting out new leaves from their crowns. Pinks are beginning to perk up after being flattened by the last snows. Buds are visible on the cottonwood; green is breaking through buds on lilacs and spirea. Roses have been breaking dormancy: some are leafing out, while others are just showing red buds and others have those buds elongating.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium, kalanchoë, bougainvillea

Animal sightings: Hornets began hatching the beginning of the week; men have begun training horses in the village.

Weather: Temperatures continued wild swings from low 20's in the mornings to 60's when I arrived home; one evening the thermometer read 68. High winds since last snow on March 5; 12:19 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Hairy golden asters are one of those plants that manages to live an exuberant live without attracting much notice, much like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
In my yard, the native composite begins to bloom in June, and keeps on blooming until frost kills the current year’s growth. I’ve seen single stems pushing through sidewalk cracks in an old Santa Fe neighborhood that’s been converted to migrant housing by real estate speculators, and I always see it along the road in August.

Went I walked along the shoulder last summer I discovered that what looked like a pure stand, in reality, was a mix of Hopi tea, gumweed, and golden asters. The first composite has a tall, narrow disk with no ray flowers, while the second has a wide, squat disk with small rays. The asters have widely spaced, long, narrow ray flowers with the usual pad of disk flowers. Different as they are, from a distance they merged into a yellow blur when seen from a car window.

Even though it peaks in mid-summer, there’s never a time when the foot high plants are covered with flowers. After the first few weeks, round white seed heads coexist with pure yellow daisies at the tips of stems that start to sprawl as they grow heavier. Gardeners and nurserymen prefer plants that remain erect, smother themselves in flowers, and drop their petals without deadheading.

Botanists have looked so carefully at individual parts they’ve discovered a number of species when in fact there may only be one. Thomas Nuttall collected Chrysopsis villosa in 1811 on the Missouri, while Frederick Pursh called it Amellus villosus in 1814. They were separated from Heterotheca because the latter’s pappus, the part that acts as a container to hold individual disk and ray flowers and their succeeding seeds, has no bristles on the ray flowers. Golden aster pappi have two layers, the outer with bristles, the other with hairs that help the seed move with the wind.

Taxonomists also excluded them from the asters, which Joseph Dalton Hooker and George Bentham believed existed in both the old and new worlds, because asters aren’t yellow. Hairy golden asters became false hairy golden asters, if they were called anything.

Then came DNA analysis. In 1996 Chung Shen Xiang and John Semple not only reported North American asters have a different parent than asters in Europe, but they’re also related to Chrysopsis and Heterotheca. In 1951, Lloyd Herbert Shinners had already suggested those two genera were the same after he found vestigial pappi on Heterotheca in Mexico, and reduced pappi on some Chrysopsis. More research just proved asters, including the yellow ones in my yard, are still evolving with porous borders between what botanists want to call species.

Ranchers ignore them because they’re not poisonous and not particularly edible, except to sheep in the worst conditions. Since the harsh tasting leaves are ignored by herbivores, the taprooted perennials often cover overgrazed lands in summer. Only zoologists have found animals that like them, including chickadees, porcupines, bees, and caterpillars.

Few tribes have noticed them. The Cheyenne, who ranged from southern Colorado to the Black Hills, used the tops as a sedative. The Navajo, who migrated to New Mexico and Arizona from father north sometime before the Spanish, only discovered the plants were slightly irritating without being dangerous and so they could be used as a ceremonial emetic. No one local has found much use for something that survives drought, intense light, and heat.

Most forget it once it drops its narrow, green leaves that look gray from their white hairs. However, towards the end of last year I thought I saw leaves coming up from a crown. When I went back, I couldn’t find them and thought I misremembered or they had gone the way of other plants fooled by the long fall. A few weeks ago, I thought I saw them again, but I had to sit on the ground yesterday and pull away last year’s dark, woody stems and dead grasses to verify that they now have the most vigorous new growth of anything in the yard.

It’s the old problem of vantage point. Get too far away, and many things look the same. Get too close, and one thing disintegrates into many. Don’t look at all, and plants thrive unheeded and unheralded.

Notes:Haines, Arthur. "Clarifying the Generic Concepts of Aster Sensu Lato in New England," Botanical Notes, 10 December 2001.
Harms, Vernon L. "Cytogenetic Evidence Supporting the Merger of Heterotheca and Chrysopsis (Compositae)," Brittonia 17:11-16:1965.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, and on-line database.

Photograph: Hairy golden aster, 22 March 2008.