What’s still green above the snow: Conifers, Apache plume, roses, hollyhock, columbine, rockrose, coral bell, snapdragon, bouncing Bess, blue flax, sweet pea, yuccas, Mount Atlas daisy.
What’s gray or gray-green: Salt bush, winterfat, buddleia, snow-in-summer, pinks.
What’s red: Cholla.
What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, geranium.
Animal sightings: Rabbit and bird tracks in snow Saturday morning.
Weather: Cold all week; snow Friday evening.
Weekly update: When I was a child trapped in the backseat on my parent’s weekly shopping expeditions, I would pretend I was in a covered wagon moving west and the fallow fields passing the side window were virgin prairie.
Around the same time, Angélico Chávez was driving along the Rio Grande to La Toma trying to recreate the experiences of Juan de Oñate and the Franciscans who came north with him in 1598. He thought the "hunched junipers and piñons" would remind them, not just of their Estremaduran homeland, but of the olive groves of the Holy land.
I was too young to know the Michigan land had changed several times since whites had intruded in the 1830's. He may not have known single-seeded junipers had been encroaching on grasslands since the suppression of wildfires in the 1880's, and were more common when he saw them than they had been during the entrada.
Ecological facts would not have mattered to either of us seeking an imaginative leap into the past through the only thing that remained, the landscape.
Those who only know the juniper from photographs of perfect specimens would not understand the associations made by a Franciscan scholar born in Wagon Mound in 1910. Our native trees are clusters of gray trunks buffeted by high winds into asymmetric stabiles that rarely reach their full 40' height.
Juniper is one of the first plants to come back after fire, and its deep taproot and supporting surface roots have adapted to drought. Even in the best conditions, it only grows about 6" every ten years, a foot every score. While this Pinaceae may bear fruit when it’s ten years old, its best years come when the gray-green evergreen reaches 50 and last another 150 years.
Juniperus monosperma is more than an indicator plant for vegetation at our elevation between 5,000' and 7,500'. For centuries, the dark purple berries were a staple of the pueblo diet, replaced only when other foods became available. Santa Clara used the wood for bows and digging sticks, bound the shredded bark with yucca for torches. Spanish speakers used sabino wood for ceiling lath.
Hu seeped into Santa Clara ritual life where Robbins and Harrington heard juniper branches were substituted for the preferred spruce in dances, while women purified themselves the third day after childbirth with bath water infused by the fleshy, flat leaves.
To the west, Zuñi women drank hot tea of toasted twigs and berries during labor. Spanish-speaking women in northern New Mexico sipped a half-cup each morning during the last month of their pregnancies brewed from the herringboned branch tips.
Now winter has set in, the only green I see from my window is the scrubby juniper where the quail run for shelter. When I walk out, all I see are green bumps on the ranges rippling away from the river and arroyo. Even though I know the trees have probably only grown since the ranch beyond ceased operations, there is still something elemental about the dark dervishes clinging to the earth like Franciscans called to matins by Chávez’s hero, Junípero Serra.Notes:Chávez, Angélico. My Penitente Land, 1974.Cobos, Rubén. A Dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish, 1983.Curtin, L. S. M. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.Dunmire, William M. and Gail D. Tierney. Wild Plants of the Pueblo Province, 1995Johnson, Kathleen A. "Juniperus monosperma", 2002, in United States Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System, available on-line.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.Stevenson, Martha Coxe. The Zuni Indians, 1904, reprinted by The Rio Grande Press, Inc., 1985.
Photograph: Juniper on the prairie, 22 December 2007.
What’s blooming: Sweet alyssum from seed.
What’s still green: Conifers, grasses, Apache plume, roses, Japanese honeysuckle, hollyhock, winecup, columbine, lamb’s quarter, rockrose, California poppy, coral bell, snapdragon, beardtongues, bouncing Bess, blue and yellow flaxes, sea pink, yellow and pink evening primroses, hartweigii, catmint, Rumanian sage, vinca, tansy mustard, sweet alyssum, white bristle stickseed, baptista, white sweet clover, sweet pea, sea lavender, yuccas, red hot poker, iris, Saint John’s wort, snakeweed, coreopsis, anthemis, chrysanthemum, tansy, Mount Atlas daisy, Shasta daisy, perky Sue, Mexican hat, purple aster, chocolate flower, black-eyed Susan.
What’s gray or gray-green: Salt bush, winterfat, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer, pinks, fern-leaf yarrow, golden hairy aster.
What’s red: Cholla, soapwort.
What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, geranium.
Animal sightings: More birds than usual on utility line Friday morning when the storm was in the air; flock of small birds in abandoned road bed Saturday morning, probably migrating; quail and red-sided birds in yard, no see-ums; brown goat down the road, horses in the village.
Weather: Cold early in week, snow lingered until rain Friday night; water in the wide arroyo yesterday morning; balmy in the afternoon.
Weekly update: Anyone who has both rented and owned a home knows there is a difference. In both cases, you enjoy the views and interior layout, but only in the one do you become intimately familiar with septic systems and furnaces.
A similar experiential difference exists between growing a plant and seeing it from a car. Take Apache plume. Anyone can enjoy the five-petaled single white flowers and pink, feathery seed heads in summer. But you only see the leaves and stems if you can get close to the loosely-branched shrub.
Many simply say the leaves are tiny or finely divided. In fact, they resemble small hands with narrow lobes that are shorter on the sides than in the middle. They unfurl much like fists, and often remain cupped rather than opening flat. They no only do not upholster the stems, but are neigh invisible from a distance.
When people can’t routinely see something, they tend to see what they expect. Shaw and Monsen observed new leaves emerge on this thornless member of the rose family in mid-April in Boise and expand in mid-May. Many who see the still green leaves in winter assume they are the same leaves.
In fact, my leaves begin to turn yellow in autumn after morning temperatures drop: last year it was early September, this year mid-October, a week after the first severely cold morning. In the past few week new leaves have been developing where the old ones are turning brown. With luck, they’ll remain on the plant.
New leaves do appear in spring, and this past year they displaced tan ones that had persisted through last year’s snows. It could take several years for me to fully comprehend the pattern, because our climate varies so much from year to year. Now I’ve had the shrubs for 18 months, all I know is what to look for.
The plant grows wild here, but it’s taken three tries to find commercial cuttings that would settle in my yard. Even though Apache plume’s a Chihuahuan desert shrub that has expanded its range, it’s still discriminating. When I’m driving, plants appear randomly along the road and across the river near San Ildefonso. In fact, they prefer the edges of arroyos and other run-offs and the ones I see daily are growing along a paved road that crosses a wide arroyo where their dense rhizomatous roots can reach water stored by both.
It’s cultural range is much smaller than its natural one: all the native usages mentioned by Moerman are from New Mexico or Arizona. Many tribes used the straight, slim branches for arrow shafts, but the Havasupai and Haulapai used roots and branches for cordage. Both the Santa Clara, who talked to men from the Smithsonian around 1910, and Spanish-speaking women, who talked with Curtin in the late 1940's in northern New Mexico, used poñil leaves for hair rinses.
Most pueblo people do not mention an association with witchcraft. The Kayenta Navajo of Arizona believed witches used the plant to induce insanity, but local Spanish-speakers mixed dried poñil plumes with other ingredients to counteract illness fomenting magic. Only the Sandia admit their brooms made from Apache plume branches are kept in the house for their "spiritual presence," while others, including the Santa Clara, simply say the brooms exist for outside use.
The difference between a cultural range and a biological one is like that between the renter and the owner, the grower and the admirer. On its own, Fallugia paradoxa prefers life under trees. In return, its branches shelter piñon seedlings and its roots harbor a cancer-fighting species of penicillium.
In the net of civilization, Apache plume’s reduced to an object of beauty by Idaho gardeners and to raw material by Arizona natives. Still, along the Rio Grande where the pueblos and Spanish settlers exchanged beliefs in witchcraft, it’s been absorbed into views of the world and the origin of things bad that are no more public than the tiny leaves alternating along pealing stems.
Notes:
Curtin, L. S. M. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.
Dunmire, William M. and Gail D. Tierney. Wild Plants of the Pueblo Province, 1995, includes Sandia.
Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, and on-line database includes Lucille J. Watahomigie, Hualapai Ethnobotany, 1982; Steven A. Weber and P. David Seaman, Havasupai Habitat, 1985; and Leland C. Wyman and Stuart K. Harris, The Ethnobotany of the Kayenta Navaho, 1951.
Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.
Shaw, Nancy L. and Stephen B. Monsen. "Phenology and Growth Habits of Nine Antelope Bitterbrush, Desert Bitterbrush, Stansbury Cliffrose, and Apache-plume Accessions," in Arthur R. Tiedemann and Kendall L.Johnson, Proceedings--Research and Management of Bitterbrush and Cliffrose in Western North America; 1982, cited by Jack McWilliams, "Fallugia paradoxa," 2000, in USDA Fire Effects Information System on-line database.
Simmons, Marc. Witchcraft in the Southwest: Spanish and Indian Supernaturalism on the Rio Grande, 1980.
Zhan J, E.M. K. Wijeratne, C. J. Seliga, J. Zhang, E. E. Pierson, L. S. Pierson III, H. D. Vanetten, and A. A. L. Gunatilaka. "A New Anthraquinone and Cytotoxic Curvularins of a Penicillium sp. from the Rhizosphere of Fallugia paradoxa of the Sonoran Desert," Journal of Antibiotics 57:341-344:2004.
Photograph: Apache plume leaves, after the snow, 29 November 2007.
What’s blooming in the area: Few roses, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, honeysuckle, canna, datura, silver-leaf nightshade, bindweed, Heavenly Blue morning glory, narrow leaf globemallow, bouncing Bess, white sweet clover, goat’s head, yellow and white evening primrose, toothed spurge, purslane, lamb’s quarter, Russian thistle, pigweed, broom snakeweed, chamisa, winterfat, Tahokia daisy, French marigolds, Maximilian and native sunflowers, áñil del muerto, goldenrod, horseweed, hawkweed, wild lettuce, golden, heath and purple asters; hay cut, apples and peaches beginning to fall.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Golden spur columbine, hartwegii, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, yellow cosmos, chrysanthemum.
Looking east: Hosta, garlic chives, large-leaf soapwort, sweet alyssum, winecup, hollyhock, sidalcea, larkspur, scarlet flax, California poppies, pink bachelor buttons, African marigolds.
Looking south: Rose of Sharon, rugosa rose, Crimson Rambler morning glory, sedum, Sensation cosmos, zinnia.
Looking west: Caryopteris, buddleia, Russian sage, catmint, leadplant, ladybells, purple ice plant, Silver King artemisia, Monch aster.
Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy; more Sweet 100 tomatoes daily.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: Quail, hummingbird, gecko, yellow butterfly, miller moth, grasshoppers, ants, bees moved to sunflowers.
Weather: Hurricanes in Caribbean but all I saw was heavier dews and colder mornings; last wet ground September 2..
Weekly update: Even someone as inattentive as I was in high school biology knows there’s something extraordinary about an annual that blooms for only two hours a day, yet perpetuates itself in a clay pot with no visible sign of flying insects.
Purslane is one of those weeds I take for granted. I used to see it everywhere in Michigan, where its red stems spread along the ground in interlacing mats. The succulent leaves were never dense enough for a groundcover, but it didn’t get tall and rangy, didn’t clamor over other plants, and didn’t produce vicious seeds.
John Winthrop, Junior, bought an ounce in 1631 in London before leaving for Massachusetts Bay Colony. Since that’s about 280,000 seeds, he must have intended to grow it for food. No doubt it made the trip many times, sometimes in seed packets like Winthrop’s, other times as a stowaway. Purslane’s now spread to south Pacific islands where there are no familiar animals.
Here in the rio arriba, it displaced the native notch leaved purslane which the Santa Clara once minced to release the mucilage for gravy. By 1915, the old world leaves were eaten by both Tewa and Spanish speaking natives, with no nutritional loss. The newcomer contains vitamins A and omega-3 fatty acids, as well as antioxidants and minerals.
My plant arrived with a potted shrub in 2000. This is the first time I’ve seen the hermaphrodite bloom. It needs light, and apparently didn’t get its necessary eleven hours a day until the sun dropped enough to reach the east end of the porch. In other parts of the country it starts blooming in late spring.
The yellow flowers begin to open around ten in the morning to a maximum width of 5/16". Soon after noon the two sepals begin to close, pushing the five petals closer to the male stamens. Within 25 minutes, the petals fold over the stamens, pushing them towards the female pistil. In another 15 minutes, all the flowers are shut into mitres under the sepals.
When the pollen from the stamens falls onto the stigma, the generative cell produces a pollen tube, which reaches down until it pierces the embryo sac formed in the ovary. Cooper says fertilization is complete within three to four hours of contact. When the seeds are mature, the protective cap breaks away, leaving a tan receptacle bearing black seeds, which spill onto leaves or fall to the ground.
The next day, new flowers open in the base of leaf clusters at the ends of stems. In the afternoons, I can see as many as five buds in an axil, some still buds, some developing grain cups. If the season is long, those seeds may produce the next generation of flowers in four to six weeks. If the winters stay warm, it doesn’t die. If a stem breaks off, it may root itself.
The wind may initiate fertilization, but this flower depends on no such fickle occurrence in its brief fluorescence. Portulaca olearcea may be an old maid, but it is rarely a barren one.
Notes:
Cooper, D. C. "Macrosporogenesis and Embryology of Portulaca oleracea," American Journal of Botany 27:326-330:1940.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco. Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.Simopoulos, Artemis P. "Omega-3 Fatty Acids and Antioxidants in Edible Wild Plants," Biological Research 37: 263-277:2004.Winthrop, John Junior. Seed list, included in volume 3 of Winthrop papers held by Massachusetts Historical Society; reprinted by Ann Leighton, Early American Gardens, 1970.
Photograph: Purslane, 2 September 2007.
What’s blooming in the area: Roses, cholla, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, rose of Sharon, sweet peas, Russian sage, datura, purple phlox, bindweed, white sweet clover, white evening primrose, English plantain, toothed spurge, Queen Anne’s lace, bachelor button, zinnia, Tahokia daisy, first sunflowers, áñil del muerto, golden hairy aster, paper flower, goatsbeard, hawkweed, native dandelion, horseweed, wild lettuce; catalpa pods; corn, tomatoes, chili, onions, squash and other foot high green crops in vegetable patches that are not identifiable from road; local produce stand advertising cherries and peas.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Miniature roses, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, butterfly weed, squash, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemums.
Looking east: Small and large-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, bouncing Bess, pink evening primrose, sweet alyssum, pink salvia, veronica, winecup, hollyhock, sidalcea, California and Shirley poppies.
Looking south: Tamarix, morning glory, daylily, tomatilla, cosmos
Looking west: Lilies, flax, catmint, white spurge, caryopteris, purple ice plant, ladybells, sea lavender, Monch aster, purple coneflower.
Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, marigold, tomatoes.
Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium
Animal sightings: Gecko, pair of quail, smaller green hummingbirds, group of yellow-bellied birds, bees, hummingbird moths, ants, aphids, grasshoppers, crickets, squash bug, black widow spiders, Japanese beetles on yellow evening primrose plants, insects too small to name; gopher destroyed roots of baptista and two hollyhocks.
Weather: Hot, but some rain Thursday after midnight; mornings cool; plants still dying along the road, but established trees and shrubs growing.
Weekly update: My squash is producing its first flowers, all males. Luckily, they are the reason I put in seeds. If I depended on the females to bear fruit, I’d starve.
Every time I came home this summer to leaves wilted in the heat, I wondered if they would get this far and pondered the fragility of agricultural life in this corner of the world where people stopped putting in corn a few years ago when it was so dry and, before that, a neighbor told me the only thing grasshoppers weren’t eating were his tomatoes and cucumbers. Corn plots are back this year, but not my neighbor’s front garden.
Times have been hard before. During the depression, frost habitually killed half the peach crop in Santa Cruz, and apricots survived one year in four. In Chimayó, the wheat harvest of 1934 wasn’t sufficient to provide seed for the next year, and they never attempted beans or squash because of the "bug pest."
Farther back, when Francisco Dominguez visited the area in 1776, locusts had been ravaging crops for five years. At San Ildefonso, those who searched for wild food found little, and their neighbors were chary of charity or trade. He reported they had become "cautious" and fear had "hardened their hearts."
Nothing is as stark as the prehistoric Guaje ruin on the Pajarito plateau where the elements uncovered bones that were thin and porous from chronic malnutrition and calcium deficiency.
People didn’t leave here in the 1930's because they discovered cash would stave off starvation if they changed their diet. With the great drought between 1276 and 1299, Anasazi abandoned dryland farming in the highlands east of the continental divide for irrigated crops along rivers.
Who knows what drove the ancients to experiment with plants. The earliest remains of domesticated Cucurbita pepo have been found in a cave in Oaxaca from some ten thousand years ago, four millennia before corn appeared there. Then it was prized for its seeds which contain lutein, carotene and beta carotene; the edible layer evolved later.
Squash, including pumpkins, was important to the pueblo peoples who abandoned the Colorado and Pajarito plateaus. To the west the Hopi roasted the seeds, sliced the meat to dry for winter, and used the blossoms for soup. Here, the Santa Clara boiled or baked the mesocarp in a bread oven.
Cucurbis became more than food; they became a symbol for how people ward off hunger. Families to the west clustered themselves into matrilineal organizations, including the Acoma and Hopi pumpkin clans. Along the rio arriba, the Tewa formed two groups, the summer squash people, who governed during the growing season when fish could be eaten and wild foods gathered, and the winter turquoise people, who ruled when families lived on stored foods and hunted big game.
Squash is also more than dinner to people whose Spanish-speaking parents were the ones who first entered the cash economy offered by the national laboratory. They may not grow it much themselves, but they remember the taste of calabaza. It’s one of the few words that cannot be translated any more than can the pleasant childhood associations of life free of worry.
Notes:Domínguez, Francisco Atansio. Republished 1956 as The Missions of New Mexico, 1776, translated and edited by Eleanor B. Adams and Angélico Chávez.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco. Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.Smith, Bruce D. "The Initial Domestication of Cucurbita pepo in the Americas 10,000 Years Ago," Science 276:932-934:1997.
Stuart, David E. "Cliff Palaces and Kivas: From Mesa Verdeto Bandelier," Glimpses of the Ancient Southwest, 1985.
US Dept of Interior. Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975.
Whiting, Alfred F. Ethnobotany of the Hopi, 1939, cited in Dan Moerman’s Native American Ethnobotany database.
Photograph: Male squash blossoms, 8 July 2007.
What’s blooming in the area: Apples, plum, bradford pear, white fence rows, purple-leafed flowering trees, first lilac, tulips, yellow iris, tansy and purple mustard, shepherd’s purse, hoary cress, stickseed whitebristle, alfilerillo, dandelion, native dandelion, downy chess grass.
What’s blooming in my yard: Peach, cherry, sand cherry, Siberian pea shrub, forsythia, grape hyacinth, hyacinth, daffodil, moss phlox, yellow alyssum, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on spirea, Bath pinks, and coral bells.
What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium, coral honeysuckle.
What’s reviving in the area: Cottonwood leaves are beginning to fill the gaps between the bright green Siberian elms; leaves appearing on apricot, Russian olive, and Virginia creeper; sideoats gamma greening. Saturday men were burning weeds on the local chapel grounds; another crew was clearing and burning trash near the wide arroyo; several men were checking their dikes while their fields were flooding.
What’s reviving in my yard: Anthemis and coreopsis came up from seed; globeflower, baptista, Maximilian sunflower, chocolate and blanket flowers emerged; leaves appeared on tamarix; leaf buds showing on locust and rose of Sharon.
Animal sightings: Gopher attacked Maximilian sunflowers a few days after they emerged; large bumble bee on Siberian peas; black butterfly with white edges on its wings; horses were grazing near main road; turkeys were in a field near the orchards.
Weather: Waxing moon. Strong winds all week destroyed leaves on several newly planted roses; Russian thistle tumbleweeds collected on fences. Heavy clouds formed many days; yesterday they finally dropped less water than the winds had taken.
Weekly update: Dandelions are fabled forces of nature.
Years ago I read they weren’t widespread until the automobile. That urban legend assumes some mythic, prelapsarian world before European plants invaded, and blames technology for the despoliation.
In fact, John Josselyn saw the flowers in New England in the 1660's, centuries before Henry Ford. At that time, Nicholas Culpepper tells us, the French and Dutch on the continent were eating the leaves in the early spring while the English were using the taproot to treat urinary problems.
Its most common use as a diuretic entered European medicine through Córdova where a convert, Arib ibn Sa’d, included it in his gynecological treatise of 965. However, seeds winnowed from puffballs probably weren’t brought by the conquistadores: Hernández Bermejo and León note bitter greens like dandelion (Taraxacum officinale), chicory (Cichorium intybus), and comfrey (Symphytum officinale) disappeared from horticultural Spain with the reconquest.
When the milky-stemmed perennial appeared on Spanish lands in northern New Mexico, the settlers called it chicória (chicory) and consueldo (comfrey). Apparently all the colonists retained from their Iberian past were some words and a recognition the three species belonged to the same epistemological category.
They treated the actual plant as a curiosity to be tested until its utility could be discerned. None of the uses mentioned by Curtin were common in contemporary herbals. Those who talked to her in the late 1940's boiled and fermented flowers to treat heart problems and pickled the leaves to purify blood. They used the flowers to dye deer skins.
Local Tewa speakers also regarded k‘ot‘awo as a new discovery to be absorbed into traditional categories. In 1916, the Santa Clara were mixing dried leaves with dough for bad bruises. At San Ildefonso, ground leaves were made into a paste applied to broken bones. Both pueblos bound fresh leaves in bandages around fractures.
They may have borrowed the idea of a dandelion poultice from the Navaho with whom they had equivocal relations. The Ramah of McKinley County applied it to swellings. The only other tribes Moerman mentions who used dandelions as a plaster were the Iroquois, another Athabaskan speaking tribe, and the Aleut who share Alaska with Athabaskan speakers.
On the other hand, the Athabaskan speaking Apache who moved to the Mescalero reserve in Otero County from farther east were able to observe others who knew the traditional plant, probably whites. They adopted it to strengthen their drinks.
Even now, long after the Smithsonian visited the Espanola valley, dandelions are still regarded as a novelty. A few years ago my western neighbor put in a sod lawn. When the yellow flowers appeared, I assumed he would exterminate them at once. Instead, with none of the received wisdom of suburbanites, he let them be for several months.
The next year, the hollow stemmed composites were growing next to my garage on his side. Since then, they’ve spread to the tiles to the south of the garage and the drip line in back.
The history of the dandelion remains a series of dots - Arib ibn Sa’d, 965; New England, 1663; Santa Clara, 1916; my neighbor’s lawn, 1990's - with no connecting lines. Folk wisdom fills the gaps, whether it be a new use or a new origination tale.
Notes:
Arib ibn Sa’d. Khalq al-janin, 964-65, cited by Hernández Bermejo and León.
Culpeper, Nicholas. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal and English Physician, 1650's, 1826 edition republished in 1981.
Curtin, L. S. M. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.
Hernández Bermejo, J. E. and J. León. Neglected Crops: 1492 from a Different Perspective, 1994, chapter on Spain on internet.
Josselyn, John. Cited by Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 1986.
Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, and on-line database includes Meredith Jean Black, Algonquin Ethnobotany: An Interpretation of Aboriginal Adaptation in South Western Quebec, 1980; Edward F. Castetter and M. E. Opler, Ethnobiological Studies in the American Southwest III. The Ethnobiology of the Chiricahua and Mescalero Apache, 1936; James William Herrick, Iroquois Medical Botany, 1977; G. Warren Smith, "Arctic Pharmacognosia," Arctic 26:324-333:1973, and Paul A..Vestal, The Ethnobotany of the Ramah Navaho, 1952.
Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.
Photograph: Dandelion, 15 April 2007, just before the flowers were torn off.
What’s still green above the snow: Conifers, Apache plume, roses, hollyhock, columbine, rockrose, coral bell, snapdragon, bouncing Bess, blue flax, sweet pea, yuccas, Mount Atlas daisy.
