Four-Winged Saltbush

Weather: Three inches of snow fell Monday with zero morning temperatures Tuesday.

Thursday snow from the south-facing roof melted, then froze again when it landed on the rose leaves below.

Afternoon temperatures didn’t rise above freezing until Friday. Snow stayed on ground where it could sink rather than rise with evaporative melting. The snow also insulated plants from the cold night temperatures. The only places bare yesterday afternoon were south facing ones where it’s always been difficult to get perennials or shrubs to grow.

9:49 hours of daylight today.

What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae and other evergreens, hollyhock, winecup, vinca, coral beardtongue, clover; new leaf buds visible on Bradford pear.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla; young branches of tamarix, apples and raspberry; leaves on roses, red hot poker, coral bells, pink evening primrose; raspberries and privet dropped leaves.

What’s blue or grey: Piñon; leaves on four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, pinks, yellow alyssum, winterfat, golden hairy and purple asters; remaining leaves fell on snow from my neighbor’s Russian olive.

What’s yellow-green: Branches on weeping willow.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium; buds on Christmas cactus.

Animal sightings: Small birds in the shrubs; geese were flying south along the river Monday; rabbits were out in the snow Tuesday in the far arroyo.


Weekly update: Four-winged saltbushes grow nearly everywhere in the arid west from central México, where they evolved, up into Alberta. In the immediate area, they don’t grow on the prairies where they would compete with bunch grasses, but instead prefer disturbed, moister lands near arroyos and wash outs.

I don’t know if this is a consequence of sheep eating the shrubs into extinction, so only relic stands remain, or if they never were particularly plentiful in this area. The closest native group to recognize them in historic times was the Jemez, who used the grey leaves to treat ant bites and revive the faint. Farther south the Isleta used the dark wood for poisonous arrowheads.

The shrub’s primary New Mexico homeland, juniper savannah, is found along feeders to the Rio Grande, including the Rio Puerco from the west. Otherwise, William Dick-Peddie suggests the shrub grows where deep sand and water coexist, like areas along the Rio Chama north of Española, the shoulders of the Rio Grande south of Albuquerque where the Isleta live, and the Great Basin desert scrub lands of the Rio San Juan in the northwest.

Before ranchers arrived, rabbits were probably the principal feeders on Atriplex canescens. They also use the shrubs for shelter and water. The Zuñi, who held ceremonial rabbit hunts, tied prayer plumes to the twigs during winter solstice ceremonies to ensure the animals would be available in large numbers.

House finches lived in my bushes this summer after they abandoned their attempts to live on the porch rafters. In other parts of the country quail, grouse and gray partridges eat the fruits, while pheasant nest under shrubs that provide shelter from winter.

Ranchers soon learned the chenopod’s protein, fat and carbohydrate levels match those of alfalfa for sheep, especially in winter when the leaves are high in carotene and other vegetation sparse. There’s enough evidence that in this immediate area someone ran sheep, because overgrazed sections haven’t recovered.


Not only are there large sections of winterfat uphill from my house and on the river side of the ranch road, but there’s a section of winterfat as you continue down that dirt road toward the ranch. Beyond the fence, pueblo land is still grass and juniper. Salt bushes grow along the boundary, some with rust-colored heads, others simple humps of loden.

You see single saltbushes along the road near the village and can spot scattered ones back a bit, here and there. However, the species has both male and female plants. There must be enough of each sex within wind reach of each other for a copse to develop. Males seem to be more common than females.

The largest stand is in a wash that lies on the other side of a road from land used by the rancher. Until the neighbor’s dogs chased them out, that’s where rabbits lived. The cottontails moved under the sheds and debris in my uphill neighbor’s fenced yard from whence they venture into the wash when the dogs are confined.


The other place the shrubs grow in large numbers is along the top of the far arroyo bank where any animal that tried to eat them would probably plunge to its death when its weight collapsed the bank under it.


The saltbush, at least for a while, would survive with its roots exposed. Indeed, one this summer that lost its footings in the August flood, put out new leaves along the bare root by the end of October.


I often wonder how anything can survive such marginal environments. The shrub itself lets rain or snow through its dense, crisscrossing branches, then hides it from the sun. The snow makes obvious that seeds take root where there’s enough hidden water to support them.


Life on the ridges remains precarious. Nothing can live forever with compromised roots. Sooner or later more of the bank erodes and skeletons, dead and alive, tumble to the arroyo floor.


But, more than dead branches fall. Seeds drift down, take root and grow quickly. A colony has developed at the south end of the far arroyo’s steep bank which is where the rabbits have been heading since Monday’s snow.


Notes: The roots and soil preferences of four winged saltbush were discussed in the entry for 11 February 2007.

Dick-Peddie, William A. New Mexico Vegetation, 1993.

Howard, Janet L. “Atriplex canescens,” 2003, in United States Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, summarizes data from a number of ethnographies, including Sarah Louise Cook, The Ethnobotany of Jemez Indians, 1930, and Volney H. Jones, The Ethnobotany of the Isleta Indians, 1931.

Stevenson, Matilda Coxe. Ethnobotany of the Zuni Indians, 1915.

Photographs: Four-winged saltbushes growing
1. on the prairie, 7 August 2011.
2. in the near wash with both males and females; winterfat in front, 2 October 2011.
3. between winterfat and pueblo land on ranch road with males and females, 7 November 2011.
4. in the near wash with rabbit tracks, 8 December 2011.
5. along the top of the right bank of the far arroyo, 12 June 2011.
6. with an exposed root along low bank of the far arroyo, 30 October 2011.
7. along the right bank of the far arroyo, 6 December 2011.
8. with dead plants washed into the far arroyo, 30 May 2011.
9. at base of right bank in far arroyo, with rabbit tracks, 8 December 2011.
10. with exposed roots and few viable branches trapping water along the top of the right bank, 11 September 2011.

Perky Sue

What’s blooming in the area: Roses of all kinds including Austrian copper, yellow Persian, pink shrubs, teas and miniatures; Apache plume, Russian olive, four-wing saltbush, yucca, red hot poker, oriental poppy, peony, fern-leaf globemallow, yellow sweet clover, oxalis, nits-and-lice, tumble mustard, hoary cress, Jupiter’s beard, white evening primrose, bindweed, western stickseed, goat’s beard, common and native dandelions; three-awn, rice, needle and cheat grass; lamb’s quarter germinated.
In my yard: Spirea, beauty bush, snowball, iris, flax, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, sea pink, coral bells, winecup, rock rose, golden spur columbine, pink evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy, perky Sue, chocolate flower; buds on hollyhock, purple beardtongue, catmint, fern-leaf yarrow, anthemis, blanket flower, coreopsis, and Mexican hat.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, petunia, French marigold, gazania.
Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, bougainvillea, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: Pair of small hummingbirds; too many ants and baby grasshoppers.
Weather: Hot, dry, windy days were replaced by cold, wet, windy ones; even so, parts of my front yard were still completely dry yesterday. Last rain 5/23/08. 15:35 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: The demand for wildflowers like perky Sue is greater than the inventory of mass producible varieties. When I bought two pots in Santa Fe in 1998, they were named Hymenoxys argenta. The rabbit ate them.

When I tried seven in 2001 the same store offered Hymenoxys scaposa. When I added five more in 2003, two were actually giant perky Sues labeled as Hymenoxys acaulis. I now have five of the first with narrow, dark-green leaves and one of the second with lance-shaped, grayer leaves. They haven’t all survived, haven’t gone to seed, haven’t naturalized. At best, two have expanded from their crowns.

I look at the yellow composites rising on bare stems from shrubby hummocks of wintergreen leaves, and wonder why they haven’t done as well as the neglected argenta plants growing in the gopher riddled median on the approach into Santa Fe.

Good Calvinist that I am, I always assume plant failure is my fault. Then, after I buy perennials year after year and treat them with different watering and transplanting techniques, I turn on the purveyors. After all, argenta is promoted for gardens in Arizona, scaposa by those in Texas and the Sandias, and acaulis for Colorado. The species whose thick taproot was converted to chewing gum by the Tewa and local Spanish-speakers in the early 20th century was richardsonii.

The last thing I consider is the possibility that nature may be the reason my natives fail. Wildflowers that are specific to a small location are inherently fussy. Apparently, the various Hymenoxys flourished on limestone soils during the dry, warm period after the Wisconsin glacier, then began adapting when the climate changed again.

At some time, the parent of the three commercially available species underwent enough genetic change that the descendants have been redefined as Tetraneuris, partly because they are the only ones that can double their sets of 30 chromosomes. One acaulis subspecies around the Great Lakes has retreated into such small, widely separated areas that the lake daisy has lost its ability to reproduce because the remaining plants are too similar to mate. Marcella Demauro found similar outcrossing, self-compatible populations in Illinois and Ohio could only breed with each other, but not within their own environments.

Another endemic in Valley Verde, Arizona, that Daniel Godec believes probably diverged from another acaulis variant, is found on only four gypsum hill tops because it has become too sensitive to soil and slope. Who knows what my particular plants need.

The local Hymenoxys, pingué, apparently was able to accept a more variable climate, for it ranges from New Mexico to Saskatchewan. It’s strongest adaptation has been the production of chemicals which poison sheep foolish enough to eat it. It apparently increased to cover vast areas when overgrazing eliminated more palatable forage.

It’s ironic that no one is offering this more forgiving species in the trade today because men have tried to grow the Colorado rubber plant commercially for the latex in the roots. Even its old uses and dangers have been forgotten since bovines replaced ovines. Michael Moore says the best many can conjure today is that it was used "to get rid of too many sheep."

The memory of yellow covered hills still leads to the desire for the long-blooming native that is satisfied by plantsmen who believe their particular offering is the true perky Sue. They look enough alike to fool all but the trained botanists, and sometimes they do actually naturalize. Just not in my garden.

Notes:
Campbell, Lesley, Brian Hubbard and Michael Oldham. "Cosewic Status Report on the Lakeside Daisy, Hymenoxys herbacea in Canada," 2002, available on-line.
Demauro, Marcella M. "Relationship of Breeding System to Rarity in the Lakeside Daisy (Hymenoxys acaulis var. glabra)," Conservation Biology 7:542-550:1993.
Godec, Daniel J. "Distribution and Taxonomic Discussion of Tetraneuris verdiensis, an Apparently Rare Edaphic Endemic from the Verde Valley of Arizona," Rare and Endangered Plant Conference, 2000.Moore, Michael. Commentary in L. S. M. Curtin, Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947; revised by Moore for Western Eagle Press, 1997.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Range Plant Handbook, 1937; republished by Dover Publications, 1988.Photograph: Perky Sue, offered as Hymenoxys scaposa, more properly Tetraneuris scaposa, 24 May 2008.

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.

Cheat Grass

What’s still green: Conifers, rose stems, yuccas, coral bell, sea pink, Saint John’s wort, yellow evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy, some grasses
What’s gray or gray-green: Salt bush, winterfat, snow-in-summer, some pinks.
What’s red: Cholla, some pinks, small-leaved soapwort, coral and purple beardtongues, purple aster.
What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, geranium, kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Bird heard chirping Thursday morning when storm preparing to come through.Weather: Ice remains in drip lines, including over the bulb bed by the garage; sprinkling of snow pellets Friday; 10:19 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Madeline Bassett pops up in Wodehouse novels to bedevil Bertie Wooster and declaim anthropomorphic images of nature. Everything she sees represents some aspect of the domestic life of the wee folk or God’s wonder-working ways.
Ironically, we use the terms we reserve for successful, if unscrupulous, businessmen for the plants we hate: aggressive, unfair competitive advantage, adaptable to deteriorating conditions, opportunistic. It’s as if plants, like women and Blacks, violate the natural order if they exhibit any of the competitive characteristics of men and large mammals.
Take cheat grass. Mine started growing late last fall, and now it’s green along the western faces of my fence and garage. Even though some is still buried in ice, it can resume growing as soon temperatures reach 37 degrees. People whose hobbies have been shaped by Hollywood’s world of perpetual sunshine find such as ability to thrive in winter abnormal.
Come spring, the annual will be the first green grass, almost dense enough to pass as a lawn. Then, in May, it turns red with seed and soon after dies. The drooping seeds attach themselves to socks and fall apart when touched, so every thin, brittle beard of every spikelet has to be removed individually. It becomes an eyesore just when city folks are ready to visit national parks.
Worse, Bromus tectorum, is not a native. It evolved in arid Asia before herbivores and has spread through overgrazed lands, especially in the Great Basin, as a mute reminder of our love for beef. Further, it spread when fire was used to eliminate unpalatable scrub. It also expands when grazing is stopped to restore the range because cattle and sheep controlled it by eating it before it sets seed.
While cheat grass didn’t create the situation, it’s blamed for perpetuating it. The stalks are curing just as fire season begins and its dead litter feeds wildfires that destroy other more desirable vegetation. In many drier areas, the native plants weren’t adapted to fire, and failed to recover, leaving cheat grass to hold the soil, at least against severe spring winds.
Some ecologists think it may be impossible to restore areas of the more arid intermountain west to their pristine pre-Columbian condition because too much damage has been done to the structure of the soil crust itself. In those areas, cheat grass may be an inescapable, permanent feature of the landscape.
None of this makes the grass welcome in my yard. I leave it along the drive where my tires keep it in check, and it prevents worse plants, like Russian thistle, from germinating. There I can enjoy it as it turns from bright green to a silvery haze of waving stalks to deep red patches, before dying tan and sere. But, I could just as easily enjoy it along the road.
When it gets near my garden, I pull it whenever I happen to be weeding the neighboring sunflowers and marigolds. It comes out with a ball of relatively short, fibrous, dirt-holding roots, that leave enough of a hole to cause problems if they had been pulled before the plant produced seed, when winds were high and nearby plants not yet established.
If I were a mule deer or bighorn sheep, I might think differently. I certainly would appreciate it right now, when its crude protein is about 20% and it’s all that’s green. But then, come April when the plants are ripening and the nutrients declining, I would have to roam elsewhere.
In this area, I wouldn’t have to go far, but in the more arid west where it’s the only plant that grows for acres, I might be reduced to a starvation diet of rain sopped stalks with 2% crude protein. Populations of black-tailed jack rabbits decline in those conditions, as do the numbers of birds that prey on them and other small mammals.
So why do people who eschew the sentimentalism of Madeline Bassett revert to anthropomorphic terms for cheat grass? When something lives on a different biological clock and uses our best management weapons against us, we have few words to describe it and nothing but metaphors to vent our frustration and helplessness.
Notes:
Wodehouse, P. G. For instance, Right Ho, Jeeves, 1934, and Jeeves and the Tie that Binds, 1971.
Zouhar, Kris. "Bromus tectorum," 2003, in United States Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System, available on-line.

Photograph: Cheat grass growing around remains of perennial four o’clock near water frozen in garage drip line; dead grasses are needle, cheat and three awn.

Áñil del Muerto

What’s blooming in the area: Winterfat, lance-leaf yellow brush, datura, purple aster, tahokia daisy nearing peak, stickleaf, white evening primrose, horseweed, hawkweed, wild lettuce, toothed spurge, ragweed, Russian thistle, áñil del muerto, golden hairy aster, faded goldenrod, bigleaf globeflower, purple mat, rose of Sharon peaked, roses, sweet pea, purple phlox, canna, bindweed, heavenly blue and wild morning glories, cardinal climber, silverlace vine, Maximilian and native sunflowers, muhly ring and black gramma grasses. Peppers and grapes visible; buffalo gourd have fruit; apples beginning to drop to the ground. More hay baled and yards mowed. Man gave up on sheep and pulled his pigweed; weed piles drying in his yard and across the road waiting to be burned.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Black-eyed Susan, blanket flower, chocolate flower, perky Sue, Hartweg evening primrose, fern-leaf yarrow, Mexican hat, yellow cosmos, creeping zinnia, nasturtium, chrysanthemum, miniature roses (Sunrise, Rise and Shine).

Looking east: Garlic chives, California poppy, crackerjack marigold, tall zinnias, winecup, floribunda (Fashion), large flowered soapwort, pink bachelor button, larkspur, thrift, four o’clock, Shirley poppy, sweet alyssum.

Looking south: Bouncing Bess, small zinnias, crimson rambler morning glory in full bloom, sensation cosmos, heath aster, blaze, rugosa and rugosa hybrid (Elisio) roses.

Looking west: Purple coneflower fading, white phlox (David), frikarti aster, lead plant, catmint, Russian sage, ladybells, purple ice plant, caryopteris peaked.

Bedding plants: Dalhburg daisies, marigolds, sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunias, profusion zinnia.

Animal sightings: Worm, grasshoppers, ants, bees, mosquitoes, small butterfly, turkey flock in village.

Weather: Gentle winds early in week, rain Thursday with light showers Wednesday, Friday and yesterday. Mornings are colder. Ground in front away from garden wet for 1" then too dry to dig.

Weekly update: Yellow daisies overflow roadside ditches. Even people who never notice nature know something’s blooming.

The incurious absorb a few names, which they apply to anything that falls into the general category represented by the signature plant. If they call these anything, it’s wild sunflower. In Spanish, the generic term for yellow flowers is girasolillo.

Field guides use the term crownbeard. They also report names like gold weed, butter daisy, yellow top, and toothache plant. Spanish speakers have tried capitaneja, flor de Santa Maria, girasolillo o Santa Maria, qillu-it pilfers and mirasolcito del campo. L. S. M. Curtin heard áñil del muerto in northern New Mexico in the 1940s. None of these roll trippingly off the tongue.

Even botonists have not produced a name anyone can remember. Cavanilles called it Ximenesia encelioides, but Bentham and Hooker reclassified it as the slightly more pronounceable Verbesina encelioides.

Daisy it remains, even if the plants get 6' tall. The composite flowers have about a dozen double notched ray petals, that vary in number just enough for the counting out rhyme to work. When the center appears pock-marked, the disk flowers are open. The brown quills are the fused anthers of those flowers.

People say the plant stinks. I’ve never noticed it, and haven’t been able to release an odor by crushing the various parts. I don’t know if it’s variation in plants, the current phase in the life cycle, the lack of moisture in the air, or a stupefied nose. Still, it’s been called skunk daisy and hierba de la bruja (witch).

Michael Moore believes áñil del muerto refers to the smell. It’s also possible it literally means deadly sunflower. Sheep, a mainstay of the historic local economy, sometimes died when they ate it. Keeler, et al, isolated the active agent as galegine, a hypoglycemic alkaloid that’s been synthesized as metformin to treat type 2 diabetes.

Uglier names are used in the south Pacific where the plant was introduced to Kure when a radar reflector was built in 1955, followed by Coast Guard installations between 1960 and 1993. From there it took over Midway. It probably spread so quickly because the annual found a perfect incubator.

Here, a few of the flat, greyish white seeds germinate in the spring. In my yard, those are the flowers that are now nearing the top of the fence. Apparently it needs a high temperature to sprout and so waits for the first rains of July, then blooms when solar or atmospheric conditions are right in mid-August. By the first of September, 6" high stalks bloom along side rangy plants that have flowers at the end of every branch.

The usual explanation for the success of an alien specie is natives forgot how to compete for resources. On the periphery of the plant’s range, Inderjit and Dakshini confirmed chemicals released by the taproot suppress the growth of radishes. In this country, peanut and cotton farmers are avaricious for eradication research.

Here, in it’s traditional habitat, it’s gregarious when left to itself, but doesn’t mix with others. If it has a choice it doesn’t appear with sunflowers. Neither likes the prairies, but both rise in the disturbed ground of abandoned gardens, fallow fields and fence lines. There’s a reason people in easier farm lands call it cowpen daisy.

I’ve thrown dead stems of both along my fence. This year sunflowers are growing with the Maximilians. The tall daisies survived south of all but a few of the rough natives. Both will try the better, wetter garden soil, but I pluck them early.

My plants arrived when my neighbor dug his septic field with its basement layer of gravel and plastic that traps water. From there the seedlings migrated west. This year, like the Mexican hat, the seeds blew along the fence where they landed along a 15' stretch in the gravel and clay of my driveway. I can’t think of a better place to leave them to exercise their allelopathic magic on the weeds that creep in from my neighbors.

It remains there today, and everywhere in the rio arriba, a brilliant autumnal presence that leaves no trace in the collective memory because it has no name.

Notes:
Curtin, L. S. M. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, reprinted by Western Edge press, 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.

Inderjit, Chikako Asakawa and K. M. M. Dakshini, "Allelopathic Potential of Verbesina Encelioides Root Leachate in Soil," Canadian Journal of. Botany 7:1419–1424:1999.

Keeler R.F., D. C. Baker, and K. E. Panter, "Concentration of Galegine in Verbesina Encelioides and Galega Officinalis and the Toxic and Pathologic Effects Induced by the Plants," Journal of Environmental Pathology Toxicology and Oncology, 11:11-7:1992.

University of Texas web-site has the best description of the flower.