Prostrate Knotweed

What’s blooming in the area behind the walls and fences: Hybrid tea roses, bird of paradise, silver lace vine, Japanese honeysuckle, trumpet creeper, Heavenly Blue morning glories nearly gone, sweet pea flourishing, Sensation cosmos, French marigolds, Maximilian sunflower; green pepper roasting done for year.

Outside the fences: Apache plume, leather-leaf globemallow, velvetweed, yellow evening primrose, datura, bindweed, scarlet creeper, ivy-leaf morning glory, older pigweed turning brown, ragweed, Russian thistle, goats’ head, chamisa, snakeweed, goat’s beard, horseweed, áñil del muerto, native sunflowers, gumweed, broom senecio, spiny lettuce, Tahokia daisy, purple, heath and golden hairy asters; milkweed leaves turning yellow, toothed spurge turning maroon.

In my yard looking north: Nasturtium, chocolate flower, blanket flower, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, yellow cosmos, chrysanthemum, Crackerjack marigold.

Looking east: Floribunda roses, hollyhock, winecup, large-leaf soapwort, scarlet flax, reseeded and Crimson Glory morning glories, pink evening primrose, zinnias; Autumn Joy sedum leaves losing color.

Looking south: Blaze, floribunda and miniature roses, cypress vine.

Looking west: Russian sage, catmint, lady bells, individual David phlox flowers, calamintha, sheltered purple coneflower, Mönch aster.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, snapdragon, nicotiana, sweet alyssum back.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, pomegranate.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, monarch butterfly, wasps, black harvester and small red ants.

Weather: Rain Tuesday night; short thunderstorm Friday morning; temperatures in high 30's yesterday morning; 11:29 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Prostrate knotweed is one of those weeds that survive because it’s no where near as noxious as its peers. It’s not poisonous, doesn’t have thorns, and doesn’t take over the best watered soil - it’s just not worth the same effort I expend to control pigweed and Siberian elms.

The dark brown seeds lie buried just beneath the surface in winter when cool temperatures and dampness revoke their dormancy, leaving them ready to germinate when conditions improve. They say the annuals first appear looking like grass, but I never notice them until a few stems a couple inches long appear with their rounded, oval leaves spaced too far apart to cover the soil.

This summer I was removing the white taproots from the zinnia bed when I was preparing it for seed in late May. Those early plants probably had four sets of chromosomes and peaked early, before the summer heat reintroduced dormancy in unsprouted seeds and sent everything else into remission.

Come the monsoons, enough moisture penetrates the warm soil for a second wave to grow, this time the ones with six sets of chromosomes. When I went out to weed in late July, I saw plants had returned in the zinnia bed and new ones were growing along the nearby fence. I haphazardly pulled some, but left many in my pursuit of other enemies.

Then, as seems to happen every year, events overtook my resolutions and things were left to grow as they would in late summer. When I went out last weekend, the knotweeds in the zinnia bed were turning brown, while the light-green ones in the shade of the fence had grow erect and lacy.

Out in the drive, in front of the garage, the thick doilies I first noted the middle of August had waxed fat, with thick blue-green leaves, some with red lines. At the leaf joints, small stems held clusters of dark rose buds, maybe a sixteenth of an inch across. Some were parting to expose their stamens, while others remain closed, shaking the pollen within to fertilize themselves.

Useful as a capacity to waste no resources on petals to attract insects or variations in chromosome counts may be to survival, I suspect an ability pass unnoticed has been more important.

No one knows where Polygonum aviculare emerged, but its fossilized seeds have been found in northern European strata dated to the Cromerian warming period during the middle ice age between 866,000 and 478,000 years ago. Jonathan Sauer believes they were "native pioneers preadapted to join in the migrations of early humans as ruderal camp followers."

With the appearance of neolithic farmers, the ground hugging plant moved into the fields from central Germany northwest to Britain. Either weeds weren’t yet seen as problems, or the red stems were tolerated.

By the time iron age people were sacrificing a man at Thor’s Grove in Jutland around 400bc, the seeds were part of the Tollund grainery, included in the gruel of his last meal. Another member of the buckwheat family, Persicaria lapathifolia, seems to have been gathered deliberately, but archaeologists debate if the inclusion of prostate knotweed was accidental or intentional.

Some 700 years later and eleven miles to the east, another man was sacrificed who’s body was found near Grauballe in 1954. His last meal contained fragments of 63 grains, including prostrate knotweed, but no spring greens or late summer fruits. From that, Peter Glob has argued he probably was killed in some late winter ritual designed to speed the arrival of spring.

The late season food fed to both men was relatively dirty, filled with hairs and ergot, a fungus that infects one of their main crops, rye. The Graballe man’s skeleton showed signs of near starvation when he was young and recent calcium deficiencies. It may be he died in a year when food supplies were particularly low, and everything non-toxic was eaten. Glob indicated the condition of his teeth showed this wasn’t his usual fare.

Prostrate knotweed moved to the compacted pathways when it was ejected by more fastidious farmers and traveled west with the first settlers to New England where John Josselyn reported in 1672 that knot grass had "sprung up since the English planted and kept cattle in New-England."

It continued moving west, annoying people who wanted perfect lawns, but otherwise dispersing by seed or contaminated nursery pots. A century ago it was considered "a common dooryard weed at middle levels in the mountains" of New Mexico.

Sometimes, people who confronted it as a new plant would test it: the Chinese tried it as a dye, the Ramah Navajo used a warm infusion to treat stomach aches. In the late nineteenth century, there was a brief fad for Hemero Tea to treat asthma and bronchitis in Austria and Germany.

But as usually happens with familiarity, most soon learned to ignore it.

In oblivion there is success for the meek.

Notes:Coward, Fiona, Stephen Shennan, Sue Colledge, James Conolly, and Mark Collard. "The Spread of Neotlithic Plant Economies from the Near East to Northwest Europe: A Phylogenetic Analysis, Journal of Archaeological Science 35:42-56:2008.

Glob. Peter Vilhelm. The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved, 2004.

Josselyn, John. New England’s Rarities Discovered in Birds, Beasts, Fishes, Serpents and Plants of That Country, 1672, reprinted by University of Michigan, University Library with 1865 notes by Edward Tuckerman.

Meerts, Pierre. "An Experimental Investigation of Life History and Plasticity in Two Cytotypes of Polygonum aviculare L. Subsp. aviculare That Coexist in an Abandoned Arable Field, Oecologia 92:442-449:1992; on chromosomes.

Rafinesque, C. S. Medical Flora, volume 2, 1830; on China

Sauer, Jonathan D. Plant Migration: The Dynamics of Geographic Patterning in Seed Plant Species, 1988

Taylor, Timothy. The Buried Soul: How Humans Invented Death, 2004; on ergot.

Uphof, J. C. T. Dictionary of Economic Plants, 1968 edition; on Hemero Tea.

Vestal, Paul A. The Ethnobotany of the Ramah Navaho, 1952.

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

Photograph: Prostate knotweed, much enlarged, in my drive, 3 October 2010.

Queen Anne's Lace

What’s blooming in the area behind the walls and fences: Tea roses, lilies, hybrid daylilies, tall and red yuccas, Spanish broom, silver lace vine, honeysuckle, trumpet creeper, Russian sage in town, larkspur, datura, Shasta daisies, zinnia, alfalfa, onions; harvesting garlic yesterday in town.

Outside the fences: Tamarix, Apache plume, four-winged saltbush, winterfat, cholla, Queen Anne’s lace, tumble mustard, fern-leaf and leather-leaf globemallows, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white evening primrose, nits and lice, milkweed, bindweed, bush morning glory, Dutch, white prairie, purple, and white sweet clovers, buffalo gourd, Indian paintbrush, goat’s head, alfilerillo, silver-leaf nightshade, native dandelion, goat’s beard, hawkweed, paper flower, chicory, strap-leaf and golden hairy asters; buds on prickly pear.

In my yard looking north: Miniature roses, daylily, red hot poker, golden spur columbine, Harweig evening primrose, butterfly weed, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Parker’s Gold yarrow, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, anthemis, orange coneflower.

Looking east: Dr. Huey and floribunda roses, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, Jupiter’s beard, baby’s breath, Bath’s pink, snow-in-summer, bouncing Bess, coral beardtongue, last year’s pink snapdragon, sea pink, Maltese cross, pink salvia, pink evening primrose; buds on garlic chives.

Looking south: Blaze and rugosa roses, sweet peas; ripe raspberries.

Looking west: Catmint, blue speedwell, blue salvia, spurge, blue flax; buds on lilies, sea lavender, ladybells, purple coneflower.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, nicotiana, tomato; buds on snapdragons.

Inside: Aptenia, zonal geraniums, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbird, geckos, cabbage butterfly, hummingbird moth on bouncing Bess, bees on catmint, small grasshoppers, large black harvester and small red ants, hear crickets.

Weather: Finally some rain Friday night; fire continues in the Jemez, although smoke’s no longer visible; 14:32 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: I learned my first conservation lessons from Queen Anne’s lace.

Like many children, I picked the clusters of five-petaled flowers for my mother, and was disappointed when they wilted by the time I got them home. I saw jars of dying wild flowers, including this one, in the dining lodge every year at summer camp and concluded there are flowers I shouldn’t pick.

I also learned that just because a flower’s pretty from a distance doesn’t mean it’s necessarily nice. When I was young, the faded green plant was nearly as tall as I. When I brushed against it, I discovered it was quite rough, covered with white hairs. It also didn’t smell very good and was often covered with small insects. The flowers are a good nectar source for flies and wasps, while the leaves feed black swallow tails. Bigger animals tend to leave the bitter leaves alone.

I eventually learned that plants like the biennial Queen Anne’s lace depend entirely on their seeds for reproduction, and every picked flower was a lost opportunity. The camp director instilled a spirit of inhibition that still influences my behavior. I almost never pick or pull a wild flower, and then only after I’ve checked that there are lots of other plants nearby.

I suspected then she was less motivated by any sense of environmentalism, than by a concern that if every child indulged her instincts, the camp would be picked bare by the end of summer and not recover the following year. We were raised with a sense of deprivation because the camp population, dominated by young girls, that changed every Sunday for seven weeks, really was too dense for nature to support.

The wild carrot remained part of the world that existed outside my car window. I could recognize the brilliant white, flat heads from any distance in early summer, and tended to ignore the ones that were going to seed, the ones that were folding up and looked like they were engulfed by green cobwebs. The British call the inverted umbrellas bird’s nest.

I knew them as soon as I saw them growing along a ditch with bouncing Bess, between a catalpa and coyote fence, in the village. I was a bit surprised - they do best in areas with 32" to 40" of precipitation a year - but there was no doubt.

V. I. Mackevec found the greatest diversity for Daucus carota existed in Afghanistan where the Hindu Kush and Himalaya meet. The wild plant spread to Greece where it was mentioned by Hippocrates around 400bc and seeds have been found in the lake dwellings of Switzerland which existed at roughly the same time.

Today, John Kartesz reports Queen Anne’s lace in every state and province except Manitoba. However, Edward Voss says it only became established in Michigan in the 1880's, and his map shows it growing along the lakes and in the wetland counties where I was raised. The reports of native use, surveyed by Dan Moerman, indicate it was only used in the east from the Cherokee of the south to the Micmac of the north and in the Pacific northwest, but wasn’t common enough to be exploited in the area between. It wasn’t listed in New Mexico in 1915, and has had only one report since.

While it was always part of my world, it was never in my world. It never grew in a yard or nearby field, where I could watch it produce a basal rosette of carroty leaves one year and a flower the next. I never had a reason to pull it from a garden, and can only take other people’s word that the tough, white taproot is parent to the modern carrot.

I’ve since learned that women in India, China, Appalachia and the ancient world used the seeds to abort a pregnancy in the first week, a usage supported by scientific research. I can guarantee that’s something we didn’t learn at camp, although it might have been useful than some of the things we did learn.

Notes:Heil, K.D, and S.L. O'Kane, Jr. Catalog of the Four Corners Flora - Vascular Plants of the San Juan River Drainage: Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, 6th ed, 2002, report it in San Juan County.

Hilty, John. "Wild Carrot," Illinois Wildflowers website, on insect associations.

Keller, Ferdinand. The Lake Dwellings of Switzerland and Other Parts of Europe, volume 1, 1878.

Kartesz, John T. "Daucus carota L.," distribution maps on USDA Plant Profiles website.

Mackevic, V. I. "The Carrot of Afghanistan," Bulletin of Applied Botany, Genetics and Plant Breeding 20:517-562:1929.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998; summarizes data from a number of ethnographies.

Riddle, John M. Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, 1992, includes scientific references.

Voss, Edward G. Michigan Flora, volume 2, 1986.

Wooton, Elmer O. and Paul C. Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915, reprinted by J. Cramer, 1972, does not mention Queen Anne’s lace.

Photograph: Queen Anne’s lace in village, 28 June 2010.

Blackberry Lily

What’s still blooming somewhere: Tea roses, California poppy, red hot poker, winecup, chamisa, chocolate flower, chrysanthemum, Mexican hat, áñil del muerto, broom senecio,
tahokia daisies, Maximilian sunflowers, purple and hairy golden asters, untouched blanket flower buds, low growing Mönch asters.

Bedding plants: Moss rose.

Inside: African aptenia and asparagus fern.

What’s turned/turning red: Pasture rose, spirea, raspberry, sand cherry, skunk bush, leadwort, pink evening primrose, Virginia creeper.

What’s turned/turning yellow: Cottonwood, globe and weeping willows, black locust, Siberian pea, Siberian elm, tamarix, beauty bush, cherries, peach, rugosa rose, lilacs, lilies, hosta, ladybells.

Animal sightings: Large black harvester and small dark ants

Weather: Tuesday’s morning’s rain followed by great squawking of birds towards the river when I was leaving for work; 10:38 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: When Americans and the Chinese look at the same thing, say a blackberry lily, they don’t see the same thing.

When Thomas Jefferson planted what he knew as Ixia chinensis in 1807, he was probably interested in the loose clusters of six, spotted, orange petals that open late morning. Soon other flowers from other parts of the world surpassed their beauty, and the iris-shaped leaves persisted on their own in ditches, along roads, and in fields east of the Rockies.

Today, gardeners are told to grow the shorter, less garish Freckle Face cultivar for its fall and winter interest. Around September 26, the pear-shaped pods on my plants split open to reveal rows of shiny black seeds. The reflexed outer wraps have since dried a papery white.

When the Chinese look at shegan they see medicine.

Steven Foster and Yue Chongxi interpret Shi Zhen Li as having recommended it for throat cancer in 1578. When George Stuart translated Li’s work in 1911, he simply said it had "some special popularity in diseases of the throat" and reported it was used for breast cancer.

Chinese and scientists from other countries that still have some respect for traditional plant medicine have been combing reports of traditional practices looking for potentially useful plants. In the 1970's, doctors at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences were testing the folk methods for treating bronchitis.

By the 1990's, chemists were isolating more than a dozen compounds from the rhizomes of Belamcanda chinensis, and identifying some as flavonoids. In 2000, Li Xin Zhou and Mao Lin had been able to create a synthetic form of one, and demonstrate its effectiveness against inflamation. Lin and others later showed the compound was a powerful antioxidant, and it has since attracted a great deal of interest.

Most recently, Asian scientists have been doing the necessary work to make possible the mass production of the blackberry lily compounds. They have been creating tests for the cost-efficient evaluation of extracts, verifying that cultivated plants don’t differ in efficacy from the ones used in laboratory tests, and trying to develop synthetic forms.

Meantime, European scientists associated with a German herbal medicine company, Bionorica, have identified two of the flavonoids, irigenin and tectorigenin, as phytoestrogens that could be used to counter problems caused by sex hormones, especially prostrate cancer. They took out their first patent on a blackberry lily extract in 2002.

Most Americans never look at the roots that so interest the Chinese. Gardeners can buy plants grown from seed supplied by Jelitto, and are told to let the short-lived perennials perpetuate themselves by going to seed. They wouldn’t know the dried roots are chrome yellow inside and have an acid taste when fresh.

The Chinese aren’t particularly interested in the inedible seeds. In the nineties, some Japanese chemists identified four enediones in the seeds, but none have stimulated any further research.

American’s don’t just not see the blackberry lily’s roots. They’ve been told it’s a member of the iris family and therefore should be avoided as potentially toxic. Chinese don’t just ignore the seeds. They’ve been warned that only the roots are useful and not to substitute aerial parts in their formulas. We both see what we’ve been told to see.

Notes:
Bionorica AG, Wolfgang Wuttke, Hubertus Jarry, Michael A. Popp, Volker Christoffel, and Barbara Spengler. "Use of Extracts and Preparations from Iris Plants and Tectorigenin as Medicaments," patent 2002/092111, 21 November 2002.

Chang, Tzu-Ching, Chih-Liang Wang, and Hsiu-Lan Wang. "Pathogenetic and Clinical Study of Bronchiolitis," Chung-Hua I-Hsueh Tsa-Chih 12:731-73:1976.

Foster, Steven and Yue Chongxi. Herbal Emissaries: Bringing Chinese Herbs to the West: A Guide to Gardening, Herbal Wisdom, and Well-being, 1992.

Li, Shi Zhen. Ben Cao or Pen Ts'ao, 1578.

Morrissey, Colm, Jasmin Bektic, Barbara Spengler, David Galvin, Volker Christoffel, Helmut Klocker, John M. Fitzpatrick, R. William and G. Watson. "Phytoestrogens Derived from Belamcanda chinensis Have an Antiproliferative Effect on Prostate Cancer Cells in Vitro," The Journal of Urology 172:2426-2433:2004.

Seki, Katsura, Kazuo Haga and Ryohei Kaneko "Belamcandones A-D, dioxotetrahydrodibenzofurans from Belamcanda chinensis," Phytochemistry 38:703-709:1995.

Stuart, George Arthur. Chinese Materia Medica, 1911, reprinted by Gordon Press, 1977.

Wang, Qing Li, Mao Lin and Geng Tao Liu. "Antioxidative Activity of Natural Isorhapontigenin," The Japanese Journal of Pharmacology 87:61-66:2001.

Zhou, Lin Xin and Mao Lin. "Studies on the Preparation of Bioactive Oligomerstilbene by Oxidative Coupling Reaction (1)-Preparation of Shegansu B using Silver Oxide as Oxidant," Chinese Chemical Letters 11:515-516:2000.

Photograph: Blackberry lily seeds, 11 October 2009.

Rugosa Rose

What’s blooming in the area: Russian olive, tamarix, tea and pink shrub roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, cholla, prickly pear, yucca, daylily, fern and leather leaved globemallows, tumble mustard, alfalfa, purple loco, scurf pea, purple clover, licorice, milkweed, oxalis, Indian paintbrush, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white evening primrose, stickleaf, nits and lice, datura, bindweed, bachelor button, perky Sue, Hopi tea, goatsbeard, hawkweed, hairy golden and strapleaf spine asters, native dandelion, needle, rice, June, brome, crab and three awn grasses; juniper berries; stickseed and needle grass seeds becoming a nuisance; more hay cut, some corn up.
What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Fragrant catalpa, Dr Huey and miniature roses, red hot poker, golden-spur columbine, hartweg, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, Moonshine yarrow; buds on butterfly weed, black-eyed Susan and Parker’s Gold yarrow.
Looking east: Floribundas, California poppy, hollyhock, winecup, coral bells, cheddar pink going to seed, snow-in-summer, small-leaved soapwort peaked, sea pink, Jupiter’s beard, snapdragons, coral beardtongue, Maltese cross, rock rose, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on bouncing Bess.
Looking south: Pasture, blaze, rugosa and rugosa hybrids, German iris, sweet pea; raspberries forming.
Looking west: Flax, catmint, Rumanian sage, blue salvia, purple and white beardtongues; buds on lilies and sea lavender.
Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum, tomato.
Inside: South African aptenia and South American bougainvillea.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, brown and tan patterned snake, hummingbird, bird taking a cherry to eat, bumble bees, grasshoppers, mosquitoes, large black harvester and small dark ants.
Weather: Rain began Wednesday before dawn and again last night; afternoon winds and low morning temperatures continue; 15:56 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: White rugosa roses blooming in my backyard have the simplest flowers, five petals surrounding concentric rings of yellow stamens. It’s hard to believe we have them from the Chinese who so artfully bred size and fullness into camillas and peonies, or that the Japanese who imported them from the mainland centuries ago left them alone.
Europeans, of course, began exploiting the crinkly-leaved shrubs as soon as hybridization became known in the 1880's with predictable results. The red F. J. Grootendorst my mother grew, a cross between a rugosa and a polyantha made by de Goey in the Netherlands, had little scent when it was released in 1919. A pink eponymous match between a rugosa and a wichurana nurtured by Max Graf was sterile when it was sold by his Pomfret Center, Connecticut, employer, James Bowditch, in 1919.
Perhaps the Chinese realized creating magnificent flowers often sacrificed other attributes and treated their useful plants differently than their ornamentals. In 1911, the American Presbyterian Mission in Shanghai published George Stuart’s report that mei gui had a cooling nature and was used to treat liver, spleen and blood problems. When he died, Stuart had been revising the 1871 work of Frederick Porter Smith who, in turn, had translated the herbal collection of a sixteenth century Ming physician and naturalist, Li Shi Zhen.
The rugosa is native to the flat, sandy shores of Lianoning and Shandong provinces, whose peninsulas separate the Bo Hai inlet from the Yellow Sea, and up through the lands north of Lianoning to Jilin, the Korean and Kamchatka peninsulas and some coastal islands including Sakhalin and Hokkaido. Li lived inland along the Yangtze river in Hubei, sandwiched between the two Bo Hai peninsulas.
In Korea, people still use haedangwha roots to treat diabetes, especially when simple protocols don’t work and treatments become complicated. Earlier, Charles Pickering reported the Ainu on the northern Japanese islands ate the red hips.
The cultural patterns that led different Asian groups to use or shun particular plant parts continue to stimulate research. Chinese biologists have found flower extracts indeed improve the liver and whole blood of deliberately aged mice, while some Hokkaido scientists have verified that pulverized hamanasu petals inhibit the growth of salmonella and E. coli in the intestine. Others working in Japan have found that rugosa extracts reverse liver and kidney damage in diabetic rats at the same time they improve "abnormal glucose metabolism that leads to oxidative stress."
Many believe the critical contribution of the rugosa is its ability to counteract the oxidant damage that occurs with aging and diseases like diabetes. Two Koreans have identified the active ingredient to be a special tannin found in the roots. Japanese researchers, who don’t believe the Hokkaido fruit of the minority Ainu is "fit to eat," have experimented with teas made with leaf tannins to introduce the plants’ antioxidants into the general diet.
Perhaps sometime in the distant past the Chinese did try to improve the magenta-colored species by selecting the largest flowers, the rarer colors of the recessive white Alba and the dominant red Rubra, maybe even nurturing the most fragrant, tastiest or most efficacious. They and others may also have expanded the original range to include places like Shandong, Hokkaido, and Korea.
Whatever they may have tried, the roses retained their fertility and rebred with their own and other nearby species to restore anything that may have been lost. The ones imported for the sandy wastes surrounding New England resorts like Newport, Nantucket and coastal Maine in the late nineteenth century are now spreading on their own and crossing with the local Rosa blanda along the Saint Lawrence. Even a Max Graf in Wilhelm Kordes’ nursery found a way to recover its virility by mating with a tea rose and doubling its offspring’s chromosomes.
A great deal can happen in a thousand years that leaves undisturbed the surface of white cups shimmering in the afternoon sun.
Notes:Cho, Eun Ju, T. Yokozawa, HyunYoung Kim, N. Shibahara, and Park Jong Cheol. "Rosa rugosa Attenuates Diabetic Oxidative Stress in Rats with Streptozotocin-induced Diabetes," American Journal of Chinese Medicine 32:487-96:2004Jeon, K. Y. and S. P. Mun. "Anti-hyperglycemic, Anti-hypertriglyceridemic and Stimulatory Effect on Glucose Transporter 4 Mrna Appearance of Hydrolysable Tannins (Rosanin) of the Rosa rugosa Root in the Streptozotocin-injected Diabetic Rats," Korean Journal of Medicine 58:180-188:2000.Manjiro, Kamijo, Kanazawa Tsutomu, Funaki Minoru, Nishizawa Makoto, and Yamagishi Takashi. "Effects of Rosa rugosa Petals on Intestinal Bacteria," Bioscience, Biotechnology, and Biochemistry 72:773-777:2008.Li, Shi Zhen. Ben Cao or Pen Ts'ao, 1578.Nagai, Takeshi, Taro Kawashima, Nobutaka Suzuki, Yasuhiro Tanoue, Norihisa Kai, and Toshio Nagashima. "Tea Beverages Made from Romanas Rose (Rosa rugosa Thunb.) Leaves Possess Strongly Antioxidant Activity by High Contents of Total Phenols and Vitamin C," Journal of Food, Agriculture and Environment 5:137-141:2007.Ng, T. B., W. Gao, L. Li, S. M. Niu, L. Zhao, J. Liu, L. S. Shi, M. Fu and F. Lu. "Rose (Rosa rugosa) - Flower Extract Increases the Activities of Antioxidant Enzymes and the Gene Expression and Reduces Lipid Peroxidation," Biochemistry and Cell Biology 83:78-85:2005.Pickering, Charles. Chronological History of Plants, 1879, cited by Edward Lewis Sturtevant in Sturtevant’s Edible Plants of the World, edited by U. P. Hedrick, 1919, reprinted by Dover Publications, 1972.Stuart, George Arthur. Chinese Materia Medica, 1911, reprinted by Gordon Press, 1977.Uhm, Dong-Chun and Young-Shin Lee. "A Study of the Application of Folk Medicine in Patients with Diabetes Mellitus," East-West Nursing Research 1:72-81:1997.

Photograph: Rosa rugosa ‘Alba’ around 3:30 in the afternoon, 7 June 2009.

Chrysanthemum

What’s green: Conifers, rose stems, yuccas, rockrose, coral bell, sea pink, sea lavender, snapdragon, Saint John’s wort, yellow evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy, chrysanthemum, anthemis, 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, zonal geranium, kalanchoë, Christmas cactus.
Animal sightings: Three horses feeding down the road.
Weather: Rain last Sunday followed by feathery frost on my windshield the next morning; the daily hoar formations suggest the waterlogged ground above the freeze line has been drying into the air. 11:40 hours of daylight forecast today.
Weekly update: We’re tired of winter here in the valley. Yesterday morning when the temperatures were already in the 40's, one man was trimming a fruit tree and another was pruning his rose of Sharon hedge. Down the road, people at two places were out with rakes while brown smoke rose beyond the arroyo.
Last Sunday I went looking for signs of spring and noticed the lilac and peach buds were fatter, while some snapdragons had new leaves. Yesterday, the anthemis looked greener. I went back to old pictures and found chrysanthemum leaves that had appeared the first part of February were now twice as large; I hadn’t notice them last year until mid-March.
I planted those particular mums in 2006 as one more attempt to add height to a bed leveled by high winds. The usual cushion mums had disappeared from local stores and the only available pots contained five skinny cuttings grown to produce flowers as quickly as possible, even if the roots were too weak to survive transplantation.
I was pleased three made it through the first winter and excited when they started to bud last September. Then came the winds and the thick woody stems listed to the north. The flowers never opened. Ever since Wrightman Garner and Harry Allard announced the existence of photoperiodism in 1920, botanists would simply say the cultivar didn’t have enough time to bloom between the time when there were nine hours necessary to stimulate the reproductive phase and a killing frost.
The composites have been cultivated for centuries. Archaeologists found them used to flavor fermented beverages buried with the wealthy in Anyang and Changzikou along the Yellow river during the Shang and Western Zhou dynasties (ca. 1250-1000 B.C.). The flowers became associated with Confucius’ qualities of a gentleman. Buddhists took kiku to Japan from Korea. The Dutch brought them from China.
Each change in world view or scientific theory has altered how they were bred, but each change was added to the existing stock of Chrysanthemum morifolium. Currently, botanists are experimenting with introducing new traits, especially obliviousness to light, from wild species while growers are seeking cheaper ways to mass produce plants that can take 6 to 16 weeks to bloom after they are artificially put into the dark at temperatures between 62 and 70 degrees.
In 1950, W. W. Schwab found mums not only need darkness to prosper, but also at least three weeks of cold weather. Brian Capon suggests that right now, while those new leaves are coming up from the perennial crown, the first stage of flower development is underway, but will soon yield to vegetative growth until darkness returns the first of August. When temperatures are warm enough in the south to support flowers before the days have lengthened, Allan Armitage has seen them skip that suspension and bloom in April.
My florist cultivars may never bloom, their buds may never have enough time to open. However, those flowers are a long way away and demands for cold and darkness are tiresome when the quality of light is changing and early morning temperatures are creeping to the upper 20's. Right now those new leaves, and with them the promise of spring, are worth any future disappointment.
Notes:Armitage, Allan M. Herbaceous Perennial Plants, 1989.Capon, Brian. Botany for Gardeners, revised 2005.Garner, W. W. and H. A. Allard. "Effect of the Relative Length of Day and Night and Other Factors of the Environment on Growth and Reproduction in Plants," Journal of Agricultural Research 4:553-606:1920.Schwabe,W. W. "Factors Controlling Flowering of the Chrysanthemum. I. the Effects of Photoperiod and Temporary Chilling," Journal of Experimental Botany 1:329-343:1950.University Of Pennsylvania. "9,000-year History Of Chinese Fermented Beverages Confirmed," ScienceDaily 7 December 2004.
Photograph: Florist chrysanthemum leaves with remains of last year’s woody stalk, 1 March 2008; pinks in background.