Lemon Scurf Pea

What’s blooming in the area: Rose of Sharon, Russian sage, buddleia, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, red yucca, datura, sweet pea, purple phlox, cultivated sunflowers, Shasta daisy, Sensation cosmos, squash, alfalfa.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, cheese mallow, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, whorled milkweed, bindweed, purple mat flower, goat’s head, white sweet and purple clovers, lemon scurf pea, stickleaf, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, prostrate knotweed, lamb’s quarter, Russian thistle, pigweed, snake weed, spiny lettuce, horseweed, paper flower, golden hairy asters, gumweed, Hopi tea, Queen Anne’s lace, goldenrod, áñil del muerto, sand burs, sideoats grama.

In my yard, looking east: Garlic chives, hollyhock, winecup mallow, sidalcea, baby’s breath, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Shirley poppies, cutleaf coneflower; buds on hosta, Autumn Joy sedum and Maximilian sunflowers.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, Illinois bundle flower, reseeded and new Crimson Rambler morning glories, sweet alyssum and zinnia from seed.

Looking west: Caryopteris, David phlox, ladybells, blue flax, catmints, calamintha, flowering spurge, sea lavender, lead plant, Mönch aster.

Looking north: Blackberry lily, golden spur columbine, Hartweig evening primrose, Mexican hat, Parker’s Gold yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, yellow cosmos from seed, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, moss rose, nicotiana, impatiens, tomato, pepper.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, other small birds, gecko, large orange dragonfly, small bees on Apache plume, hornets, harvester and small black ants, cricket.

Weather: Hurricane Don sent us some rain from the Gulf; not enough to replenish the reserves of deep rooted trees and shrubs, but enough to reach the roots of grasses; last rain 8/4/11; 14:42 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: This year’s drought has been tough on even the plants one assumes are adapted to a dry climate. Buds formed on prickly pear cacti, then shriveled without opening. No flowering stalks emerged from narrow-leaved yuccas. Many summer blooming grasses are still dormant.

Scurf peas have been sparser in some places, produced fewer white clusters everywhere. In a good year all you usually notice are bright green, branching plants that get about a foot high. The usual trefoil is reduced to three long, narrow segments rather like chicken’s feet which overlay one another to give an illusion of bushiness.

From a distance the flower heads look like Dutch clover balls buried deep in the foliage. Nearer, they resemble small locos on stems jutting from beneath leaf junctions. In some parts of the country, especially west of the Rockies, the flowers are blue, lavender or purple.

Psoralidium lanceolatum is native to the Great Plains from Saskatchewan and Manitoba south to Texas and west. In the early twentieth century, Elmer Wooton and Paul Standley said it was found west of Santa Fe and in Tesuque edging the east side of the Rio Grande valley, in Coolidge and Zuñi in McKinley County to the west, and the Mogollon mountains and Plains of Saint Augustin in Catron County to the southwest.

There are two populations near my house. One clings to the gravel and sand sides of the large arroyo and in the sandy feeder above that brings water down from a higher bank. They usually begin blooming in mid-May, and have more bumpy, sticky pods than flowers by the first of July. The florets appeared a week or so later this year; the seeds, so far, are few.

The other group grows in a sunken section that looks like a nascent arroyo aborted by harder soil toward the river. Some plants are growing in the clay and sand bank fill where the road was built to cross the wash, while others are growing along the sandy bank beside the gully where the road was cut to level itself.

The herbaceous perennial produces new growth from both the tap root and root buds. This year, plants in the clay loam wash either stayed dormant or only the main stems emerged from the roots. The plants have been shorter and the stand less dense. There have also been far fewer flowers. The plants in the sand fared better.

The nitrogen-fixing legume is one of the few flowers able to grow in pure sand dunes. In the Chico Basin dunes southeast of Colorado Springs, it grows with sand muhly and blowout grass (Redfieldia flexuosa). In the Great Dunes north of the Rio Grande, it’s found with prairie sunflowers and blowout, needle and rice grasses.

The roots form extensive systems of fleshy branches that reflect the availability of water. John Weaver has a drawing that shows a thin taproot that extends down 4.5' before it expands into a fat tube with more lateral roots. Seven feet down the root branches are dense with many ending in nodules.

In the wetter grasslands east of the Rockies, the fleshy section isn’t buried so low. Cheyenne women used wooden digging sticks to gather mohk ta en in early summer for food. By the 1920's, they had changed to iron rods.

Here, the water conserving organ must be deeper. I used a flat stone to dig around one of the smaller plants in the arroyo, and found only a narrow, pliable white taproot that had no taste beyond what one expects biting into a grass stem. As I chewed, it became woody and broke into strips surrounding a white, flat section. In the drier Great Basin to the west of the Rockies, native people used the available fibrous roots to make string and nets.

The Navajo living in the drylands at Ramah near Zuñi in the 1950's didn’t use scurf peas for food, although Paul Vestal suggests the sedentary herders did still dig some roots like wild potatoes (Solanum jamesii) and mariposa bulbs. Instead, they used the roots with other plants to treat venereal diseases.

They were more interested in the above ground parts whose habit they called winding. The knobby leaves are covered with glands. When you rub them, you release an oil that smells of lemon. Only, of course, they didn’t know about lemons until the Spanish arrived. The Diné thought it smelled more of buffalo water, and used ayani biliz ha-lcin as a lotion for Gameway, a ceremonial relic of a nomadic life dependent on hunting in the far north where drought was rarely so common.

Notes:
Bovin, Phyllis Pineda. “Plant Adaptations to Active Dune Systems,” San Luis Valley Environmental and Conservation Education Council Natural Resources Education Quarterly Fall 2005; on Great Dunes.

Grinnell, George Bird. The Cheyenne Indians, vol 2, 1928; treated as Psoralea lanceolata.

Kelso, T, N. Bower, P. Halteman, K. Tenney, and S. Weaver. “Dune Communities of SE Colorado: Patterns of Rarity, Disjunction and Succession,” 2004 Southwestern Rare and Endangered Plants Conference; on Chico Basin.

Nickerson, Gifford S. “Some Data on Plains and Great Basin Indian Uses of Certain Native Plants,” Tebiwa 9:45-51:1966, cited by Dan Moerman, Native American Ethnobotany, 1998.

Vestal, Paul A. The Ethnobotany of the Ramah Navaho, 1952; treated as Psarolea lanceolata.

Weaver, John E. Root Development of Field Crops, 1926.

Wooton, Elmer O. and Paul C. Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915, reprinted by J. Cramer, 1972; treated as Psoralea micrantha.

Wyman, Leland C. and Stuart K. Harris. Navajo Medical Ethnobotany, 1941; treated as Psarolea lanceolata; they translate the name as “odor of bison urine.”

Photograph: Lemon scurf pea, 31 July 2011.

Silver-Leaf Nightshade

What’s blooming in the area: Russian sage, buddleia, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, red yucca, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, purple phlox, cultivated sunflowers, Shasta daisy, purple coneflower, zinnia, squash, alfalfa, corn.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, cheese mallow, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, velvetweed, whorled milkweed, bindweed, purple mat flower, goat’s head, white sweet clover, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, western goat’s beard, spiny lettuce, horseweed, paper flower, golden hairy asters, gumweed, Santa Fe thistle; toothed spurge germinating.

In my yard, looking east: Garlic chives, winecup mallow, sidalcea, baby’s breath, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Shirley poppies; buds on Autumn Joy sedum and cutleaf coneflower.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, Illinois bundle flower, reseeded morning glories, sweet alyssum from seed.

Looking west: Caryopteris, ladybells, blue flax, catmints, calamintha, flowering spurge, sea lavender, white mullein, Mönch aster; buds on David phlox.

Looking north: Blackberry lily, golden spur columbine, Hartweig evening primrose, Mexican hat, Parker’s Gold yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, moss rose, nicotiana, tomato, pepper.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird, other small birds, gecko, hummingbird moth, small bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants; hear crickets.

Weather: Despite a bit of rain Tuesday night, it’s still so hot and dry I’m watering twice as much and not staying even; last slight rain 7/19/11; 15:34 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The origins of cheese are shrouded in Neolithic mists when people in the near east were first domesticating plants and animals.

Once they learned to milk their cattle, sheep and goats, they needed methods to preserve the harvest. Milk was churned, boiled and fermented. Historians believe cheese was discovered when they stored milk in animal pockets, specifically the fourth stomachs of young calves which contain an enzyme, chymosin, that reacts with casein in milk to precipitate solid curds and leave liquid whey.

No one knows where the discoveries were made: evidence points to central Asia. The knowledge of rennet spread west when groups moved across the Danube. There’s some possibility people living in the area of modern Switzerland were raising cattle for milk and using baskets and wooden tools to process it in middle Neolithic times. Otto Tschumi thinks it possible a form of goose grass, Galium palustre, was used as a curdling agent.

The subsequent development of copper tools created a need for ores that moved the emerging Bell Beaker cultural complex into the Iberian peninsula around 2500bc. Animal remains suggest there were more female than male animals in Beaker settlements and those animals were older when they died. That, in turn, implies dairy practices accompanied the mines. Perforated bowls have been found at many sites which archaeologists believe were used to strain cheese.

No one knows when the technology of cheese moved through the south. The first pictorial record comes more than a thousand years later from a painting in the tomb of Ipy, sculptor to Rameses II. The first written record is from The Odyssey in which Homer described Cyclops milking ewes and kids to make cheese that he strained through wicker.

The Phoenicians, then the Romans conquered Spain and the north to consolidate and centralize trade. In the decades after Christ’s death, Pliny the Elder listed cheeses coming to Rome from as far away as the Alps, Nîmes, and Bithynia.

Within the Empire, Columella, who had family in southeastern Spain, said Romans commonly used lamb and kid’s rennet, although thistle flowers, false saffron seeds and fig tree twigs could be substituted. The cardoon thistle is still used on the steppes of Estramdura with merino milk to make the semi-hard, whitish Torta de la Serena.

Centuries later, when the conquistadores left Estramadura for México, they took cheese and the idea it could be made with vegetable rennets with them. Someone, or somebodies, experimented with local plants to discover the pea-sized fruit of silver-leaved nightshade would work in place of the European Cynara cardunculus.

Trompillo is still used to make the semi-hard, white asadero cheese in Chihuahua where it’s used in any food that requires melted cheese. Javier Cabral says his mother’s foster sister in Zacatecas still makes it daily from the “extra-fatty” leche de apoyo the cow reserves for her calf. He says his Aunt Marta “adds rennet” while the milk’s still in buckets, then lets it set. When the curds have formed, “she wraps them in cloth, places them in a hollowed-out log with a drainage hole drilled in it, then sets heavy stones on top to press out some of the whey.” Later she adds salt.

The knowledge of vegetable enzymes, if not cheese making, moved north both with the Spanish and through native communications networks. When Matilda Coxe Stevenson visited the relatively isolated Zuñi in the late nineteenth century, they were using ha’watapa berries with goat’s milk. Instead of waiting for the curds to congeal, they used the first stage as “a delicious beverage.”

To the west, the Pima, who had even less contact with Europeans until the Gadsden Purchase, combined the Spanish use of Solanum elaeagnifolium with European methods by mixing powdered berries in milk with “a piece of rabbit or cow stomach” to produce a drink.

To the east, where Spanish influences were stronger, the Cochiti used ashika to curdle milk like the local Spanish speakers, who called the blue-flowered plant tomatillo del campo. The more nomadic Navajo used dried or fresh berries with goat’s milk, while the Davis Apache in Texas used berries to thicken the goat’s milk they carried with them when they traveled. The tiny tomatoes survive on dead stems into the next blooming season.

Silver-leaf nightshade has a wide range, from northern México to Colorado and Nebraska east, but hasn’t been utilized outside the southwest settled by the Spanish where it may have proliferated on lands disturbed by the settlers. Many of the areas to the east were settled by Germans who had such a strong cheese making tradition based on cattle rennet that it would have been hard for them to imagine a vegetable substitute.

Today, when cheese can be bought at the grocers, the one to two-foot high members of the nightshade family have been abandoned to bloom along the road. If the webbed flowers, with their five petals pulled back and yellow stamens pushed forward, are considered at all, it’s as a pest. Not only do the fruits produce 60 to 120 seeds that can live ten years in the soil, but the herbaceous perennial can reproduce from root fragments that crowd out crops like cotton.

However, if you go into an Española grocery, to the side of the packets of highly processed American and Swiss cheeses and bags of shredded Monterrey Jack, cheddar and mozzarella, you’ll see packages of sliced asadero from California made from pasteurize grade A and skim milk, sea salt and enzymes along with sodium citrate and soy lichen.

If you look a bit more, you’ll find some piles of octagonal white cheeses in square vacuum-sealed packages that have come from México through Anthony, Texas. They only say they’re made from pasteurized milk, salt and rennet.

Notes:
Cabral, Javier. “Mexico Feeds Me: Exploring Mexico's Culinary Heritage,” Saveur website, 2 May 2011.

Castetter, Edward F. “Ethnobiological Studies in the American Southwest I. Uncultivated Native Plants Used as Sources of Food,” University of New Mexico Bulletin 4:1-44:1935, on uses by Cochiti and Spanish-speakers.

Columella, Lucius Junius Moderatus. De Re Rustica, anonymously translated in 1745 as L. Junius Moderatus Columella of Husbandry.

Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. By the Prophet of the Earth, 1949, on Pima.

_____. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore, on Davis Mountain Apache.

Garrido-Pena, Rafael. “Bell Beakers in the Southern Meseta of the Iberian Peninsula: Socioeconomic Context and New Data,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 16:187-209:1997.

Homer. The Odyssey, eighth century bc.

Ipy. Photograph of wall painting depicting cheese making available at the Sabor Artesano website page, “A Brief History of Cheese.” Rameses II reigned 1279-1213bc.

Jacob, Mandy, Doris Jaros and Harald Rohm. “Recent Advances in Milk Clotting Enzymes,” International Journal of Dairy Technology 64:14-33:2011, on la Serena cheese.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, summarizes data from a number of ethnographies, including Morris Steggerda, “Navajo Foods and Their Preparation,” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 17:217-25:1941.

Organisation Européenne et Méditerranéenne pour la Protection des Plantes. “Solanum elaeagnifolium,” Bulletin OEPP 37:236-245:2007.

Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus). Naturalis Historia, book 11, section 92, translated by Harris Rackham, 1940.

Rodríguez-Torres, K., J. A. López-Díaz and N. R. Martínez-Ruiz. “Physicochemical Characteristics and Sensory Properties of Asadero Cheese Manufactured with Vegetable Rennet from Solanum elaeagnifolium,” 2008 Food Science and Food Biotechnology Congress.

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

Tschumi, Otto. Urgeschichte der Schweiz, vol 1, 1949, cited by Sarunas Milisauskas, European Prehistory: A Survey, 2002.

Photograph: Silver-leaved nightshade growing in Virginia creeper near an alfalfa field, 17 July 2011.

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.

Gumweed

What’s blooming in the area behind the walls and fences: Hybrid tea roses, bird of paradise, buddleia, silver lace vine, honeysuckle, trumpet creeper, Heavenly Blue morning glories, purple phlox, Sensation cosmos, French marigolds, cultivated and farmer’s sunflowers; pyracantha berries; local supermarket roasting green chile people buy by the burlap bag.

Outside the fences: Tamarix, Apache plume, whorled milkweed, leather-leaf globemallow, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white and yellow evening primroses, bindweed, datura, scarlet creeper, pale trumpets, clammy weed, stickleaf, Dutch, white prairie, and white sweet clovers, buffalo gourd, goat’s head, alfilerillo, prostrate knotweed, toothed spurge, pigweed, ragweed, Russian thistle, chamisa, snakeweed, goat’s beard, paper flower, spiny lettuce, horseweed, strap-leaf and golden hairy asters, áñil del muerto, native sunflowers, goldenrod, gumweed, Tahokia daisy, late summer grasses; buds on broom senecio, heath and purple asters.

In my yard looking north: Miniature roses, golden spur columbine, Hartweig evening primrose, nasturtium, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, anthemis, yellow cosmos, chrysanthemum.

Looking east: Floribunda roses, hosta, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, Jupiter’s beard, large-leaf soapwort, baby’s breath, pink evening primrose, Shirley poppy, reseeded and Crimson Glory morning glories, garlic chives, Autumn Joy sedum, cut-leaf coneflower, zinnias, Maximilian sunflower.

Looking south: Blaze and rugosa roses, rose of Sharon, Illinois bundle flower, sweet pea, tomatillo.

Looking west: Russian sage, caryopteris, catmint, lady bells, David phlox, flowering spurge, blue flax, perennial four o’clock, calamintha, lead plant, purple ice flower, purple coneflower, Mönch aster; purple coneflowers germinating.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, snapdragon, nicotiana, sweet alyssum; Sweet 100 tomatoes reddening.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbirds, gecko, cabbage butterfly, bee, black harvester and small red ants, mosquito.

Weather: Storm came through Monday; left little water but temperatures began dropping ten degrees some mornings; rain yesterday, heavy mist this morning; 13:04 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: I live on a hill. The road descending the slope makes a ninety degree turn outside my drive. The opposite lot is vacant and monsoon weeds grow to the pavement edge, further limiting visibility.

Since it’s a county, not state road, there’s no maintenance. Neighbors with mowers and blades rake the shoulder whenever they get annoyed. The taller, late-growing plants come back, while shorter ones like hairy yellow asters and toothed spurge thrive at their bases.

For years, Russian thistle and pigweed were the primary plants. Last summer, white sweet clover was dominant with some gumweed and Hopi tea joining the mowed asters.

These apparently were considered worse than the allergens. Last winter, someone used his snowplow to scrape back several feet into a short berm. For the next several weeks, the edge of the road was impossible to find because loosened dirt washed across the pavement.

Ragweed came back in place of the clover. Since it remained short until the past week, the gumweed wasn’t cut down in July and has grown knee to thigh high. While the bushy mounds are covered with buds, few are ever open. They blend into the mass of noxious greenery along the curve.

Gumweeds are survivors. The most common form, Grindelia squarrosa, emerged in the Great Plains, possibly within the Rocky Mountains, but has been reported everywhere in the country except the southeast. It’s a typical late summer composite, yellow with disk and ray flowers, a deep taproot, and seeping resin that coats the thick leaves.

As it moved southeast into Kansas and Texas, curly gumweed shed it’s ray flowers and developed reddish stems. Many think that it became a separate species, Grindelia nuda. Other gumweed species are found only in Texas, suggesting the effects of isolation on a plant adapting to changing soils and irrigation patterns.

The gumweed growing by my drive is likely to have twice the chromosomes as other gumweeds, but most consider aphanactis to be a subspecies of nuda. In western Chihuahua the teeth along the leave edges of aphanactis are more spiny than glandular. West of continental divide, nuda crossbreeds with endemic Arizona species in still more attempts to adapt to even harsher environments.

The local gumweed, when given the opportunity, begins branching a foot or so above ground and rebranches into separated terminal buds. The outer shell of each is covered with rows of flexed leaves or bracts that make the rounded buds look more formidable than they are.

As it opens, the young head widens out into a concave disk that often fills with the gleaming white resin. The collection of narrow, tubular flowers continues to expand into a flat button surrounded by bracts. Finally, the outermost ring of disk flowers grows taller.

Lenora Curtin thought the fringe collected pollen from the center, when the flower failed to be pollinated externally. However, Max Dunford, who experimented with crossing aphanactis with local Texas and Arizona species, believes the flowers cannot fertilize themselves.

One would think the highly visible gum would have invited experimentation, but the Navajo have more recorded uses for the liquid than the Pueblos. They used it to induce vomiting, destroy ant hills, and bind cuts. It may be the plant was replaced by other cures after the conquest, since William Dunmire and Gail Tierney have heard Picuris and San Juan used it for kidney problems, Jemez used it to clean skin abrasions, and Cochiti used the flowers to relieve toothache pains.

However, Curtin found northern New Mexican Spanish speakers had found more uses for yerba del buey, than the indigenous people in the 1940's, including a tea for kidney problems and steam for rheumatism. Even today, Robert Trotter found aphanactis is one of the home remedies used along the lower Rio Grand in Texas to treat sores, while Michael Moore has discovered other local uses that exploit the anti-bacterial qualities of the leaves.

An alternative explanation for the comparative paucity of pueblo uses is that the plant was simply less common in the past when the native herbals were being developed, but was more common by the time the Navajo and Spanish invaded. We know it was in the area in prehistoric times from a bowl, containing edible amaranth seeds mixed with gumweed seeds. No one knows if the mixture was deliberate, or simple contamination from two plants in seed at the same time.

We also know gumweed thrives on overgrazed and otherwise destroyed lands and that it, and the allied squarrosa, spread along rail lines and roads. When Meriwether Lewis first spotted squarrosa, it was growing along the Missouri. When Joseph Hooker saw aphanactis in 1887, it was growing in Cañon City, a mine support town on the Arkansas. When Per Axel Rydberg documented the rayless flower in 1906, he found the biennial on the sandy soils around the rail town of Durango in southwestern Colorado.

Sometime last Sunday, after I’d taken my pictures, someone cut a foot wide swatch of verbiage around the curve, including the ragweed and gumweed, to leave the dying plants to mulch their seeds. Once again, someone has insured the ruderal plants will continue to thrive when already degraded land is newly abused.

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

Didry, N., M. Pinkas, and M. Torck. "The Chemical Composition and Antibacterial Activity of Leaves of Various Grindelia Species," Plantes Medicinales et Phytotherapie 16:7-15:1982.

Dunford, M. P. "A Cytogenetic Analysis of Certain Polyploids in Grindelia (Compositae)," American Journal of Botany 51: 41–61:1964, cited by Strother and Wetter.

Dunmire, William M. and Gail D. Tierney. Wild Plants of the Pueblo Province, 1995.

Moore, Michael. Los Remedios, 1990.

Nesom, G. L. "Studies in the Systematics of Mexican and Texan Grindelia (Asteraceae: Astereae)," Phytologia 68:303-332:1990; considers aphanactis part of nuda.
Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, summarizes data from a number of ethnographies including Paul A. Vestal, "The Ethnobotany of the Ramah Navaho," Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology Papers 40:1-94:1952.

Rydberg, Per Axel. Flora of Colorado, 1906.

Strother, John L. and Mark A. Wetter. "Grindelia squarrosa (Pursh) Dunal," on eFloras’ Flora of North America website; considers aphanactis part of squarrosa.

Trotter, Robert T. II. "Folk Remedies as Indicators of Common Illnesses: Examples from the United States-Mexico Border," Journal of Ethnopharmacology 4:207-221:1981.

Weber, William A. "Colorado Collections Made by Sir Joseph Hooker in 1887," Journal of Biogeography 30:679-685:2003.

Photograph: Aphanactis gumweed in most of its phases, 22 August 2010, with hairy yellow asters in back; the reflections are from the resin.

Lamb's Quarter

What’s blooming in the area behind the walls and fences: Hybrid tea roses, roses of Sharon, buddleia, lilies, daylilies, silver lace vine, honeysuckle, trumpet creeper, Heavenly Blue morning glories, Russian sage, purple phlox, Sensation cosmos, zinnias; green tomatoes and squash visible from road; cut alfalfa.

Outside the fences: Tamarix, Apache plume, winterfat, Queen Anne’s lace, whorled milkweed, leather-leaf globemallows, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white and yellow evening primroses, bindweed, datura, bush morning glory, stickleaf, Dutch, white prairie, and white sweet clovers, buffalo gourd, goat’s head, alfilerillo, silver-leaf nightshade, 5' pigweed common, Russian thistle, goat’s beard, hawkweed, paper flower, Santa Fe thistle, spiny lettuce, horseweed, strap-leaf and golden hairy asters, áñil del muerto, native sunflowers, goldenrod, gumweed, Tahokia daisy, sideoats grama; with rains, late summer plants began emerging including lamb’s quarter, new Russian thistles, clammy weed, purslane, ivy leaf morning glory and prostrate knotweed.

In my yard looking north: Miniature roses, blackberry lily, golden spur columbine, Harweig evening primrose, squash, nasturtium, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Parker’s Gold yarrow, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, anthemis, orange coneflower.

Looking east: Floribunda roses, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, coral bells, Jupiter’s beard, coral beardtongue, large-leaf soapwort, baby’s breath, pink evening primrose, Saint John’s wort, reseeded morning glory, garlic chives; buds on hosta, Autumn Joy sedum, cut-leaf coneflower; ripening everbearing raspberries

Looking south: Blaze and rugosa roses, Illinois bundle flower, sweet peas, tomatillos.

Looking west: Caryopteris, catmint, lady bells, David phlox, white spurge, blue flax, sea lavender, perennial four o’clock, calamintha, purple coneflower; Mönch aster.

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

Inside: Aptenia, zonal geraniums, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbirds in pairs, geckos, sulphur butterfly, bees, grasshoppers, black harvester ants, explosion of small red ant hills.

Weather: More bad air; rain last night; 13:59 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: When writers try to imagine the life of hunter-gatherers, they usually are more interested in hunting. This not only reflects their readers’ interests, but the technology of spears is something that can be described and the excitement of the chase dramatized. The resulting meal can provide the festive background necessary for other parts of the narrative.

The only person I’ve read who captures the challenge of gathering to survive is Julian Steward. The Shoshoni speakers of the Great Basin steppes lived in an environment where the fall gathering of piñon nuts was nutritionally more important than communal rabbit hunts that didn’t occur every year and more reliable than game animals so rare they couldn’t provide enough skins to keep them clothed and shod.

During much of the year, nuclear families roamed alone seeking seeds protected by hard shells and small animals like mice, gophers, insects and lizards. In spring, after nature had dispersed the seeds, they turned to greens. If they were near a stream, they could forage for roots.

The "what" and "how" of survival were learned early. Steward says there were less than a hundred edible species in their range. More difficult was learning "where" and "when" a plant might be available. When rainfall varied by place and year, and seeds lay dormant in the soil, each child learned to be observant and draw conclusions.

The Española valley is more hospitable than the intermontane west, but rainfall is still erratic. This year’s wet winter and early spring meant there were greens early. However, the high temperatures of the past few weeks, both in the early morning and afternoon, shortened the blooming periods of forbs and turned grasses and shrubs brown. Before last weekend’s rains, traditional people would have been anxious.

When I went out in the mist last Sunday, the first newly emerged plant I saw was lamb’s quarter, growing in the biological crust on the flat land above the arroyo. The smooth stems, with their wax covered green leaves were no more than 6 inches high. They usually appear in my drive in early May, but rarely get much taller. The ones outside my window in northern New Jersey were 6 feet by mid-summer.

Lamb’s quarter’s an old world plant that probably crossed the ocean multiple time in seed stocks. Even today, the Henry Doubleday Research Association reported the black seeds in lots of clover, carrots, lettuce and wheat from England, Canada and Denmark.

The member of the goosefoot family was adapted by tribes in every part of the country as a green, one that was usually boiled. The leaves contain vitamin C and calcium. The only ones who ate the seeds rich in protein and vitamin A were in the west, the Hopi, Navajo, Paiute and some in Montana.

The annual has been eaten as far back as we know. The first confirmed instance was a handicapped young boy who’d been stabbed and placed in a Kayhausen peat bog in lower Saxony that tanned his skin, ate his bones and preserved the contents of his stomach. He’s been dated to 300 to 400 bc in an area that traded with Rome but still used iron tools.

The earliest farmers in central Europe spread the Bandkeramik culture up the Danube, then across a belt of fertile loess soils where they grew wheat, peas and lentils between 5400 bc and 4500 bc. Lamb’s quarter probably increased. The taproots do better on nitrogen rich, cultivated soils. One reason they’re so nutritious is their hairs absorb trace minerals that are passed through to the leaves and seeds.

Corrie Bakels found parched, unripened seed in the wheat chaff from Bandkeramik sites in Germany, which suggest it was a field weed removed when the grain was husked. She also discovered reports from three areas in the Netherlands with soil samples that were almost exclusively lamb’s quarter seed, both ripe and unripe, which she believes came from people cleaning the greens to eat, not as a crop, but as a gathered familiar.

While Chenopodium album is a recent arrival in the Americas, related plants in the genus arrived earlier. Owen Davis found the closely related amaranth and chenopods marked the appearance of modern plant communities in the Great Basin in the Pleistocene periods when the glaciers were receding.

Uncarbonized Chenopodim berlandieri seeds have been found at Cloudsplitter and Newt Kash rockshelters in eastern Kentucky, suggesting the plant was being domesticated east of the Mississippi around 1400 bc.

In México, berlandieri subspecies were cultivated as were quinoa and ambrosioides. The first continue to be grown as chia and huauzontle; the second was introduced from the Andes and used in Aztec religious ceremonies; apazote is still eaten in Mayan areas.

In early southwestern settlements, Chenopodium seed remains are found that are difficult to isolate from the more common amaranths, and disappear after the adoption of corn.

In this immediate area the alien lamb’s quarter’s too fussy to become a staple, and was not mentioned by the Tewa in 1916. In Frijoles Canyon on the Pajarito Plateau, only a few plants are found each year in late July. The only years I’ve seen many here were 1999 and 2001. I saw more turning burgundy in the autumns of 2006 and 2007 where my neighbor kept horses. In England Dirty Dick’s known for colonizing manure piles.

Last weekend, this cohabitant with the earliest farmers was startling in its brightness, a surprise, even if I was only gathering wool when I found it.

Notes:
Bakels, C. "Tracing Crop Processing in the Bandkeramik Culture," in Jane M. Renfrew, New Light on Early Farming: Recent Developments in Paleoethnobotany, 1991; the early neolithic sites were Beek-Molensteeg (one area) and Geleen-Haesselderveld (two areas).

Behre, Karl-Ernst. "Collected Seeds and Fruits from Herbs as Prehistoric Food," Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 17:65-73:2008; on Kayhausen.

Bond, W., G. Davies, R. Turner. "The Biology and Non-Chemical Control of Fat-Hen (Chenopodium album L.)," Henry Doubleday Research Association website, November 2007.

Coile, Nancy C. and Carlos R Artaud. "Chenopodium ambrosioides L., (Chenopodiaceae): Mexican Tea, Wanted Weed?," Florida Department of Agriculture, Division of Plant Industry, Botanical Circular 33, 1997.

Davis, Owen K. "The Late Pleistocene Development of Sagebrush Steppe in the Eastern Great Basin," American Association of Stratigraphic Palynologists annual meeting, 1994.

Dunmire, William M. and Gail D. Tierney. Wild Plants of the Pueblo Province, 1995.

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

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

Smith, Bruce D. "Eastern North America as an Independent Center of Plant Domestication," National Academy of Sciences Proceedings 103:12223–12228:2006.

Steward, Julian H. "The Great Basin Shoshonean Indians: An Example of a Family Level of Sociocultural Integration," in Theory of Cultural Change, 1965, condensed from "Basin-Plateau Sociopolitical Groups," Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, 1938.

Photograph: Lamb’s quarter growing on dark soil crust near the prairie arroyo, 25 July 2010.