Chemistry Isn’t Everything

Weather: Humidity remained normal, even though there were little to no low-level moisture in the atmosphere. That means water was being sucked out of the earth and plants.

The cooler temperatures forced me to begin watering when it got warm enough to not harm the hoses; in the summer I start as soon as I can walk about safely. The annuals and recently planted shrubs haven’t like getting watered less frequently when they are fighting transpiration.

Last useful rain: 9/23. Week’s low: 33 degrees F. Week’s high: 83 degrees F in the shade.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid roses, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, Russian sage, bird of paradise, roses of Sharon, datura, chrysanthemums, Maximilian sunflowers.

This past week someone had some cosmos come into bloom, and another had some Heavenly Blue morning glories. I have a few short zinnias with very small flowers. This is at least a month later than usual.

What’s blooming beyond the walls and fences: Bindweed, green leaf five eyes, alfalfa, white sweet clover, goat’s head, yellow evening primrose, pigweed, Russian thistle, broom snakeweed, native sunflowers, áñil del muerto, Tahoka daisies, golden hairy, heath and purple asters, quack grass

What’s blooming in my yard: Betty Prior and miniature roses, yellow potentilla, calamintha, lead plant, winecup mallow, large-flowered soapwort, David phlox, perennial four o’clock, Silver King artemesia, African marigolds, chocolate flower, plains coreopsis, anthemis, bachelor buttons, zinnias, blanket flowers

Bedding Plants: One snapdragon, two nicotiana

What’s Coming Up: Golden spur columbine, cheat grass

Tasks: Last week when I put some bags of peaches in the trash, I slit them to drain the water that had separated from the pulp. This week that water had evaporated and the bags were slightly lighter. The smell still was sour.

Animal sightings: Chickadees, geckos, monarch butterflies, bumble and small bees, heard crickets, grasshoppers, hornets, small ants

I’m ambivalent about woodpeckers. On the one hand, they clean out insects in wood and help solve a problem. I’m convinced the reason I had fewer hornets this year was one was banging away on the eaves of the house last year. However, their mere presence signals a problem exists. The one I’ve been hearing recently has been in the cottonwood. The one time I saw the small black-and-white bird, it was on dead wood, but if it’s in the leaves on live wood it wouldn’t be seen.

When the neighbor’s cat patrolled the yard, the mice stayed away. Now that they’re, wisely, keeping the cat in the house, the mice are back. There seems to be no getting rid of them completely.

Weekly update: People are fascinated by the fact some plants produce chemicals that inhibit the growth of others and give them more control of their territory. I think black walnuts are the best known.

The interest is partly an extension of developments in biology that followed the development of more sophisticated microscopes. Biochemistry has explained some diseases, and researchers are continuing to find new ways it affects our brains. It has become the single key to everything.

Others are interested in chemicals as weapons. As soon as botanists discovered the plant hormone that controlled senescence, the military turned it into Agent Orange. It became the basis for herbicides like Round-Up, which are used as expensive, labor efficient ways to handle weeds.

Note the constant interest we have in finding the easiest, cheapest way to do things. Our obsession with productivity blinds us to recognizing the many ways plants have of controlling their environment.

One of my chrysanthemums, the yellow Mary Stoker, remained relatively short all summer. Then, when it came time to bloom, the stems grew longer. They got both taller and reached wider until it became a ball.

The result was the water, which came from a spraying hose, was diverted to it at the expense of all the neighboring ones. They are now suffering.

A week of so ago I cleared part of a bed where golden spur columbine ranges to make room for some iris. This week I returned to the area to plant some lilies, and found some columbine had come back.

The seeds must be tiny. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any. They fall thickly on the ground, especially around other plants and the brick walks. When I trowel around to uproot the young seedlings, all I do is remove competition so ungerminated seeds have an easier time.

They crowd out other plants with their leaves on arching stems that divert water like Mary Stoker. Worse, the roots go down lower that those of neighboring plants, then expand into tubers that monopolize water in their areas. It’s impossible to do more than break off the tops without destroying the unsuspecting neighbor.

Notes on photographs: All taken 26 September 2019.
1. Mary Stoker chrysanthemum (Chrysanthemum rubellum). Blanket flowers (Gaillardia aristata) can just be seen behind it.

2. Golden spur columbine seedlings (Aquilegia chrysantha) surround the stem of a lily.

3. Mass of golden spur columbine seedlings that came up under a Kelway anthemis (Anthemis tinctoria).

Bullies in the Hood

Weather: The solstice was the first day with low humidity in Los Alamos and Santa Fé. That it coincided with that solar marker may be chance.

Last useful rain: 6/17. Week’s low: 43 degrees F. Week’s high: 92 degrees F in the shade. Smoke from Mexican fires continues to enter area; sometimes it was replaced with smoke from Arizona.

What’s blooming in the area: Dr. Huey rootstock and hybrid roses, yellow potentilla, catalpa, desert willow, silver lace vine, Japanese honeysuckle, red-tipped yucca, lilies, daylily, red hot poker, Spanish broom, sweet peas, purple salvia, blue flax, larkspur, snow-in-summer, hollyhocks, golden spur columbine, datura, yellow yarrow, coreopsis, blanket flowers

What’s blooming beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, cholla cactus, showy milkweed, white tufted evening primrose, tumble mustard, buffalo gourd, bindweed, green leaf five eyes, alfalfa, wild licorice, nits and lice, plains paper flowers, goat’s beard, Hopi tea, strap leaf and golden hairy asters, native and common dandelions

What’s blooming in my yard: Betty Prior, Dorothy Perkins, rugosa and miniature roses, catmints, Johnson’s blue geranium, winecup mallow, smooth, foxglove, coral and purple beard tongues, bouncing Bess, Maltese cross, California poppy, Dutch clover, coral bells, pink evening primroses, Queen Anne’s lace, Mexican hats, white yarrow, chocolate flower, plains coreopsis, black-eyed Susan, anthemis; pansies that wintered over

Bedding Plants: Wax begonia, nicotiana, sweet alyssum, snap dragons, pansies

What’s reviving/coming up: Friday I put in more seeds, because so few had come up. Ant hills have been multiplying, and the sidewalk ones were patrolling the beds. I tried sprinkling an insecticide over the beds when I was done to slow the depredations.

Tasks: One man finally planted his vegetable plot this week. Another, waited to last week to put out plants he protected with plastic cylinders. He probably has a problem with rabbits.

Two people erected small canopies to sell produce on roads in town. One listed cherries, onions, and sugar peas.

I continued to pick peaches from low limbs, either to protect the branch or my forehead. So far the unripe fruit hasn’t started to smell or attract insects to their trash bags. Apparently, the chemicals that cause rotting haven’t developed yet.

Animal sightings: Chickadees, gecko, monarch and cabbage butterflies, bumble and small bees, red and brown dragonflies, heard crickets, hornets, mosquitoes, small ants

Now that the sweet cherries are gone, so too are the birds. I managed to get four sour cherries this week, my entire harvest for the year.

Weekly update: We all know the bullies, the plants that naturalize and crowd out their neighbors. Most are prolific seed producers, and many have deep roots that penetrate under the plants with radiation fibrous ones.

Golden spur columbine has been one of my problems. The two I planted in 1997 have taken over a fifty-foot bed. Every time I clear a space to plants seeds for some other perennial, the seeds it already deposited wake up and take over.

A couple years ago I noticed the red hot pokers that had self-seeded from another area were able to hold their own. Even when the Aquilegia chrysantha seeds came up directly under their leaves, the Kniphofia uvaria cultivars managed to survive.

That led me to think maybe plants with bulbous roots would be able to withstand the siege on their space. I bought a variety of hybrid daylilies in colors that contrasted with the columbine’s butter yellow. The Hemerocallis cultivars survived, and bloomed, but every year the columbine grow so close the daylily leaves are lost to view. And, of course, the flower colors weren’t exactly what was described.

Last fall I ordered some bearded iris to see if they could work. Unlike the daylilies, which send up several shoots from the crown the iris leaves are closely united near the ground. That makes it hard for the columbine seedlings to germinate within the plant’s domain. The Iris germamica bloomed in spring, and so far are holding their own.

I also got enticed by a catalog that offered Asiatic lilies for naturalizing. The price was much lower than the specimens sold by the local big boxes. They too made it through the winter, no small achievement for bulbs. Many fail that first test.

Now the Lilium are blooming. It will take another year to know if they will succeed. Bulbs usually bloom the first year, because they spent the summer in ideal conditions. It’s the second year that matters.

Notes on photographs:
1. Unidentified daylily cultivar and golden spur columbine, 1 June 2019.
2. Golden spur columbine seedlings, 22 June 2019.
3. Red hot pokers and golden spur columbine, 22 June 2019.
4. Daylily cultivar surrounded by golden spur columbine foliage, 22 June 2019.
5. Asiatic lilies, so far free of golden spur columbine plants, 22 June 2019.

Columbine Returns

Weather: Fall arrived on Friday when the morning temperature near my house fell to 33 degrees.

Last useful rain: 9/26. Week’s low: 33 degrees F. Week’s high: 82 degrees F in the shade.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid roses, yellow potentilla, buddleia, silver lace vine, Russian sage, rose of Sharon, datura, sweet pea, coreopsis, Maximilian sunflowers, chrysanthemums, zinnias, pampas grass

What’s blooming in my yard: Chocolate flowers, blanket flowers, Mönch aster, white cosmos, African marigolds, bachelor buttons, larkspur

What’s blooming outside the walls and fences: Apache plume, stick leaf, velvetweed, bindweed, silver leaf nightshade, greenleaf five eyes, leather leaf globemallow, broom snakeweed, Hopi tea, horseweed, wild lettuce, plain’s paper flower, áñil del muerto, native sunflowers, Tahoka daisy, pigweed, Russian thistles; purple, heath, and golden hairy asters; quack grass; seven-week, black, blue, and side oats grama

Bedding plants: Pansies, sweet alyssum; petunias and dwarf marigolds locally.

Tasks: The days get shorter, and so does my time to work outside. This week I switched from a three-day watering cycle back to a four-day one. It’s now dark at 6 am, when I used to start.

Animal sightings: Cat, small brown birds, geckos, small bees, hornets, other small flying insects, sidewalk ants, crickets

The neighbor’s cat doesn’t like cold air. Some mornings it looks like it would dive into the house in the morning, even though the rest of the time it treats me with suspicious indifference.

Weekly update: This summer I cleared the golden spur columbine that was crowding the daylilies. I also did some leveling with new soil.

The columbine is back with a vengeance. The plants in the new soil have woods that are at three to five inches across, and deeper than my spade will dig. I get out what I can, but the remains will regenerate. I had hoped to plant something else there, but not I fear the columbine roots will choke anything from underneath.

The plants also reburied the daylilies. There’s one small rose that’s disappeared completely. When I did them out, I find the same kinds of massive roots have replaced the smaller ones I removed earlier.

Seeds landed between and right next to leaves that stopped the flow of air. They put down narrow roots, then expand. It's hard to get them out without damaging the daylily or poker root. Even then, the buried remnant is likely to squeeze out the desired plant.

When I remove the plants, I discover the ground covered with small seedlings. What with the cool temperatures and bits of rain this is their season to grow.

Notes on photograph: Tree of life on sign for a business painted on the side of an adobe building, 19 August 2018.

Nature’s Wonders

Weather: Sun, wind, smoke from fires around Santa Fé and Cochití with last rain 5/13/12; 14:32 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming in the area: Dr. Huey and other hybrid roses, Japanese honey suckle, silver lace vine, trumpet creeper, Spanish broom, red hot poker, daylily, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, alfalfa, Russian sage, blue perennial salvia, scabiosa, larkspur, yellow flowered yarrow, brome grass.

Farmers making their first hay cuts.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, tangerine yellow flowered prickly pear and cholla cacti, showy and whorled milkweeds, leatherleaf globemallow, alfilerillo, tumble mustard peaked, purple mat flower peaked, gypsum phacelia, stick leaf, tufted and prairie white evening primroses, scarlet bee blossom, velvetweed, pale blue trumpets, blue gilia, white and pink bindweeds, oxalis, wild licorice, scurf peas, loco, silver leaf nightshade, buffalo gourd, horse tail, plain’s paper flower, goat’s beard, cream tips, strap leaf and golden hairy asters, native dandelion, needle grass; buds on Virginia creeper.

Early dry heat, on top of little spring rain, is hastening the transition to seed production for plants like purple mat flower and woolly plantain that might have bloomed longer. So far, the wild prickly pear are producing few flowers, though they’d prepared for a great season with lots of buds.

In my yard, looking east: Bath pinks, snow-in-summer, small leaved soapwort peaked, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, baby’s breath, sea pink, coral bells peaked, coral beardtongue, pink evening primrose, winecup mallow, Rose Queen salvia, first California and Shirley poppies, Saint John’s wort; buds on sidalcea.

Looking south: Rugosa, floribunda and miniature roses, Dutch clover, tomatillo.

Looking west: Blue flax, Siberian and Seven Hills Giant catmints, Rumanian sage, Johnson’s Blue geranium, Husker and purple beardtongues, white spurge; buds on lilies, sea lavender; pods forming on baptisia.

Looking north: Catalpa, golden spur columbine, hartweig evening primrose, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis; buds on butterfly weed, Mexican hat; sour cherries turning red; berries forming on privet.

Bedding plants: Petunia, nicotiana, moss rose.

Those plants that prefer cool weather or shade - pansies, sweet alyssum, impatiens, snapdragons - going or gone out of bloom.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, other small brown birds, geckos, cabbage, sulphur and paisley butterflies, bumble bees and other small bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants. Noisy, but invisible insects.

Some kind of cottony insect webs on plants along the shoulders. Doesn’t seem to matter if the plant is active or passed its prime, so long as there’s a bare stem.


Weekly update: You always know what the label says on a plant and what you intend. What you get is sometimes another matter. Only someone with a strong legalistic bent would try to fix a point of accountability that explains what blooms and consider suing for breach of promise.

I ordered a bare root climbing Iceberg rose from Wayside Gardens in 1998. Every year it’s gotten about three feet tall and never bloomed, probably because it’s never gotten enough water. Last year, I replaced a nearby weak spirea that hadn’t made it through the winter of 2009-2010. With the drought, I moved a hose to ensure more water in the area.

This year the Iceberg finally produced a number of semi-double, pale pink flowers. Not what I expected with the name Iceberg. Botanica describes it as a pure white floribunda introduced in 1968 as a sport of a 1958 Kordes rose. It admits there may be “occasional pinkish flushes in the bud stage, especially in the early spring and autumn when the nights are cold and damp.” It even suggests that if dew hits a petal, the morning sunshine may bring out the pink.

Temperatures are now in the high 80's and damp is a fantasy. I’m amazed the rose actually survived all these years and didn’t revert to rootstock. Why should I be surprised that when it’s finally bloomed, the environment has altered the color of the flowers in unforeseen ways?

After all, one lives with unexpected variations. For years I tried to start hollyhocks with seeds and plants, and some combination has naturalized. They’re never pure red or pure white, but hues in between. Most of the Althcea rosea are light pink


but a few are a deeper rose.


When one dies, another takes it place somewhere. They don’t seem to be that different from sweet peas, except the Lathyrus latifolia that grow around here are almost always rose colored.


Rose is probably dominant and, through natural selection, all that exists in the local gene pool. The only place I know I can see the range of Mendelian colors and quantities is where the village ditch makes a ninety degree turn and dumps water that has been running in a concrete bed into a dirt one. Soon after, the ditch angles into a narrower conduit to pass under the road, then continues, after another turn, on the other side in an open bed.

Everything downstream is the usual rose. The only place you can see light pink


or white flowers is the short stretch where transitions in bed, direction and flow rates have apparently trapped seeds coming from who knows where. The water ultimately comes from the Santa Cruz dam in Chimayó and flows miles through an open channel.


While one grows used to nature’s variations, there are also flowers that are reliably the same color year after year. I planted a number of itinerant perennials in a bed where they can go to seed. Their location and number changes from year to year, but not the color. To get variation, I had to use different species - coreopsis, anthemis, chocolate flowers, black-eyed Susans and golden spur columbines. There’s some variation in the blanket flowers, but nothing else changes.


That is, until last year, when a columbine showed up beyond the edge of the border with red sepals.

I have a friend in Santa Fé who grows the red Canadian and blue Colorado columbines along with the native Aquilegia chrysantha, and he says he sometimes gets unexpected colors. But, I know my gene pool is a pure as one can be. I bought two plants in August of 1997 from Santa Fe Greenhouse. When they didn’t do well, I ordered a few more from Weiss Brothers the next year. However, there’s was already a seedling. From that small parentage, plants have filled a bed 40' by 6' and every one has always been the same color - no mutations, no recessed characteristics ever.


The unusual plant survived the winter and has been blooming again in its isolated location. A few weeks ago, I thought I saw a very light colored columbine at the other end of the bed, upwind from the bicolor. When I looked closer, I saw it was growing with another plant with red sepals.

I could blame the effects of drought or I could consider the profligate ways of moths which may have found another species growing somewhere in the village. Or, I can just watch and wonder what will happen next year while lawyers try to sue someone for causing the Colorado Peak fire near their expensive homes in Santa Fé.

Notes: Botanica. Botanica’s Roses, 2000.

Photographs:
1. Last year’s golden spur columbine with red sepals, 27 May 2011.

2. Climbing iceberg rose, 6 June 2012.

3. Pink flowered hollyhock growing where it planted itself in needle grass, 9 June 2012.

4. Rose colored hollyhock, 6 June 2012.

5. Rose colored sweet pea which has climbed into a red leafed plum, 4 June 2012.

6. Light pink flowered sweet peas growing along a village ditch, 5 June 2012.

7. White and rose sweet peas growing along the same section of shaded ditch, 5 June 2012.

8. Migrating perennials, including golden spur columbine, coreopsis and blanket flowers, 5 June 2012.

9. Golden spur columbine with a bicolor and an albino in their darting fish phase at the west end of the bed, 24 may 2012.


10. Golden spur columbine plant with red sepals that’s come back this year at the east end of the bed, 13 May 2012.

Golden Spur Columbine

What’s blooming in the area: Catalpa, four-winged saltbush, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, sweet pea, locoweed, oxalis, yellow sweet clover, oriental poppy, fern-leaf globemallow, purple salvia, white evening primrose, scarlet beeblossom, velvetweed, purple mat flower, tumble mustard, bindweed, wooly plantain, goatsbeard, hawkweed, native dandelion, Apache plume, pink shrub, tea and other hybrid roses; rice and black grama grass. Needle grass seeds are beginning to stick to pant legs, three awn grass seeds beginning to work loose; pink evening primroses back in yard where Japanese beetles decimated them in 2003. One farmer is letting bales of hale cure in his field.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Miniature rose, red hot poker, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat; buds on butterfly weed.

Looking east: Dr. Huey rose, coral bells, thrift, pinks, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, creeping baby’s breath, catchfly, pink salvia, rockrose, winecup, California poppy, Mount Atlas daisy, Kellerer yarrow; buds on bouncing Bess, Shirley poppy and hollyhock.

Looking south: Weigela, beauty bush, spirea, iris, rugosa, floribunda and Blaze roses; buds on daylily.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, purple and white beardtongues, Valerie Finnis artemisia; buds on lilies, sea lavender and Rumanian salvia.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, marigold; buds on acorn squash.

Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, gecko, bees on baptista and catmint, white butterfly on snapdragons, grasshoppers, ants, stink bugs.

Weather: Warming days and cold nights; rain last Sunday and yesterday; high winds Wednesday knocked fruit off peach, broke branches on locust and deflowered shrubs and trees.

Weekly update: My golden spur columbine is as much a wildflower as the novel Ramona is a realistic description of Indian life.

It’s not that they didn’t begin life as wildflowers and history, but that over time they changed into garden plants and a romanticized view of the past. When Henry King filmed Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel in 1936, he cast Loretta Young as the half-breed girl and Don Ameche as the Indian. It would have been impossible to do otherwise with a story of white reactions to miscegenation.

If my plants were still the species, the two seedlings I bought in 1997 would have died by now. Instead, they fill an area 5' by 8'. Two years ago, the grasshoppers left mere stubs that didn’t bloom last year. But now, they’re back.

Golden columbines have been slowing disappearing since the Pleistocine. Today, they grow in moist canyons east of the Continental Divide, usually in areas with igneous rock. Mine grow in sand and clay derived from volcanic ash in an area with morning and late afternoon shade.

Large-winged hawkmoths, with tongues that reach through the flower to the nectar in the spurs, are the species’ most important pollinator. The only sphingids I’ve noticed here were hummingbird moths in 2000 and 2001 in other parts of the yard. So far as I know, I’ve never seen a white-lined sphinx which feeds on columbine and is reported in Rio Arriba county.

The male anthers in the species mature earlier than the female organs, so they can only produce seed when moths transfer pollen from one flower to another. Then, the seed germinates best when air temperatures are between 77 in the day and 68 at night.

My flowers still have the adaptations for the moths: the long tails, the open petals that don’t close at night and face every direction to ensure an insect moves from one to another. However, commercial breeders like Keift Bloemzaden could not have afforded to perpetuate such idiosyncratic reproductive requirements.

Even though found primarily in New Mexico, Arizona, Texas and Mexico, seeds from the Colorado exclave are probably the ones used by early breeders. Silver mining that began near Georgetown in 1864 attracted the Union Pacific. Transportation, in turn, brought cultured tourists. Harvard botanist Asa Gray visited the area in 1872, when Charles Parry named a mountain for him. A year later, Gray officially described Aquilegia chrysantha.

A mere five years later, Jackson went to Colorado Springs looking for a clean air for her lungs. On her carriage rides into the Cheyenne mountains, she saw the columbines in ravines and had heard their Latin name.

Since European columbines were known to interbreed, plantsmen in eastern America and Europe would have been eager to experiment. Robert Nold believes most of the commercially available flowers today are "Yellow Queen" or one of its descendants.

Anything that can crossbreed or reproduce like my columbines is free to become a wildflower again. Jackson’s allusions to such variability of the species are still too controversial to admit historic re-enactments on her novel. At most, if anyone dared film Ramona today, Hispanic and Indian actors would be hired.

Notes:Gray, Asa. American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Proceedings 8:621:1873, cited by Nold.

Jackson, Helen Hunt. "The Procession of Flowers in Colorado," Bits of Travel at Home, 1878.

_____. Ramona, 1884.

Nold, Robert. Columbines: Aquilegia, Paraquilegia, and Semiaquilegia, 2003.

Opler, Paul A., Harry Pavulaan, Ray E. Stanford, and Michael Pogue, Butterflies and Moths of North America, 2006, database available on-line.

Photograph: Golden spur columbine, 3 June 2007.