Apache plume (Fallugia paradoxa, rose family, Rosaceae) is a native shrub of the southwest, found from Colorado and Texas west to California and Arizona and in neighboring areas of Mexico. It is a pretty shrub with white flowers and distinctive clusters of long-lasting cream or pinkish fruit resembling plumes.
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| Apache plume, Fallugia paradoxa |
Increasingly you see advocates for planting natives adding "do not buy cultivars."
Cultivar is defined as "a plant variety that has been produced in cultivation by selective breeding." In the context of native plants, we are talking about wild native plants that have been grown and selected for desirable characteristics, perhaps a more intensely pink flower or resistance to mildew.
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| dogwood cultivar with variegated leaves |
Lyon Arboretum of the University of Hawaii at Manoa provides a look at Honolulu quite different from the beaches.
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| View of Waikiki Beach, Honolulu, Hawaii |
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| Colorado columbines (Aquilegia coerulea) and golden banner (Thermopsis rhombifolia) |
Maltese cross is a handsome red garden flower, easy to remember once you have noticed it. I learned it as Lychnis chalcedonica but properly it is Silene chalcedonica, although you can find it called Lychnis in many places still.
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| Maltese cross, Silene chalcedonica |
I wrote last time about the benefits of planting natives in our yards. (link)
With a few notable exceptions, most American yards, ornamental plantings, and crops over the last fifty years have been introduced plants from outside North America. Settlers brought their favorite plants with them. Furthermore, local plants were boringly familiar, exotic plants were much more interesting.
Now we want to change that, add lots of natives to our landscapes. And, natives are no longer boring and familiar because they have been so thoroughly displaced. Tulips and lilacs are familiar, sulphur flower and holly grape are not.
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| tulips, Tulipa |
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| sulphur flower, Eriogonum umbellatum |
The conservation community is urging people to grow plants native to their area. At the same time, you can find articles arguing against planting cultivars of native species. It is difficult, buying a native plant, to figure out how to avoid a cultivar. And why should you? This is a big topic. I'll cover it in a series of posts. First, why grow natives at all?
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| Natives beebalm, black-eyed susans and a bit of grass |
Pennyroyal (Mentha pulegium) is a small European mint (mint family Lamiaceae) that was an important medicine for millennia. It was used to treat a number of illnesses but was sufficiently tricky to use that it has been replaced by other medicines and you rarely see it in North America, even in herb gardens.
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| European pennyroyal Mentha pulegium |
I first saw sunbright as little groups of succulent leaves near the plants I was studying, in a rocky grassland in the City of Boulder Open Space.
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| sunbright |
My friend, showing me around her beloved Oregon, took me to the coast at Seaside.
We walked the beach. (Of course!) Inland, in Portland, it was in the upper 80s and getting hotter. The beach, on the other hand, was chilly enough to require a sweatshirt. And the ocean so cold that few people were in the water.
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| beach at Seaside, Oregon |
We come past the Fall Equinox, considered the beginning of Autumn. Flowers of Spring--crocus, snow drops, daffodils--are famous. This time of year a new group of plants flower, less famous plants than those of Spring. They deserve more acknowledgement. These are the last plants to flower. Their blooms announce the very end of the growing season.
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| Battered butterfly on rabbitbrush (Ericameria) flowers |
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| woodbine, Parthenocissus vitacea |
Summer is ending, in fact, has ended for many people. Here are photos of the summer past, in the Rocky Mountains:
From meadows with knee-high grasses
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| common mallow, Malva neglecta |
Then you look down and think, "oh just a weed."
That flash of magenta in the meadow
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A closer loook shows its a legume, pea family, Fabaceae. In the Colorado Front Range, only locoweeds, milk vetches and vetches are that color. The vetches, genus Vicia, are small and vining, with tendrils. That's not what I have here.
The locoweeds, genus Oxytropis, and the milk vetches, also called locoweeds, genus Astragalus, are quite similar. Locoweeds have flowers with pointed tips on the central fused petals (keel), pointed leaves, and virtually no stems. Milkvetches have blunt keels, less pointy leaves, hairy leaves and stems and leaves on flower stems.
When I started doing field work, about 1972, the cameras available with good enough lenses to take photos of plants or insects were big heavy single lens reflex cameras. My camera was so unwieldy that I only took it with me about once a week, and on that one day got whatever photos I wanted.
Photography wasn't easy. The macro lens unbalanced the camera, so it was hard to keep it stable. Worse, I had to get pretty close to the subject to focus, so the insects I wanted to photograph saw the big dark macro lens and moved to the other side of the stem or leaf.
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| shieldbug with prey (ant) on Ipomoea carnea leaf, Guanacaste, Costa Rica, 1972. Maybe the bug thought it was hiding in the leaf or just wasn't afraid, since brightly colored predatory bugs generally bite, sting, or taste awful. |
Walk with me. Imagine late July at Alderfer Park in Evergreen Colorado, at 7800' in the Rocky Mountains. The morning was turning hot, but was still pleasant.
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| Start of the trail |
Orange mountain dandelion is a an easily-recognized native wildflower of cool areas in western North America.
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| orange mountain dandelion Agoseris aurantiaca |
Not all the bright flowers are equally attractive to a bee. Flower shapes are functional. They encourage pollination, but pollinators come in various shapes and sizes, so flowers fit some pollinators and not others. Which, if you take the insect's point-of-view, means some flowers are food sources and others are not. Bees like flowers they can land on and then climb into the flower, or walk across tiny flowers.
Some places in the U.S., creeping Jenny (Lysimachia nummularia, primrose family Primulaceae) is a weed, some places a ground cover.
It has been a wet spring and early summer in northern Colorado. Many days have had rain. I measured a single day's rain at 1.1", the wettest single day in the 5 years I've had a backyard rain gauge. Denver had its 4th wettest May and wettest June ever recorded. Denver has exceeded its average annual rainfall with half the year to go. I'm 50 miles to the north and we don't get quite the same storms, but we're very, very wet too.
In consequence, the countryside is green and plants everywhere are thicker, taller, and flowering more.
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| Devil's Backbone |
In the novel I published this winter, I imagined an elderly Spanish woman visiting central South America in 1630. Although fascinated by tales of the Americas, she had never traveled beyond Spain. In the early 17th century, the Americas were old news but European daily life was still largely untouched. For example, most American foods were not immediately attractive to Europeans. The few that were instant hits, chocolate and vanilla for example, were in such short supply initially that even the kings of Spain had to ration their consumption lest it run out before the next ship.
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| freshly roasted cacao beans (chocolate) Theobroma cacao |
Sweet potatoes are morning glories, or morning glories are sweet potatoes. That's because sweet potatoes are Ipomoea batatas, in the genus Ipomoea with all the morning glories. If you've grown sweet potatoes, you will have seen the tubular blue flower, very like weedy morning glories such as Ipomoea hederacea and Ipomoea purpurea.
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| sweet potatoes, Ipomoea batatas |
This spring I've been gardening daily. My current Garden Concept is a space of native plants, that welcomes the insects that eat them and the birds that consume the insects. But I like plants, so I have no intention of digging out the peonies or lilacs, even though they support very few native insects. With that complex approach, I took a look at my garden and discovered it was even more complicated.
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Dyer's madder, Rubia tinctorum (madder and coffee family, Rubiaceae) was the base of most red cloth in Eurasia for millennia.
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| dyer's madder, Rubia tinctorum |
Horsetails are odd enough that long ago when I knew very few plant names, I saw one and asked "what is this?" The hollow jointed stems are not like much of anything else. I learned not just that it was a horsetail, but that its an ancient plant. My college textbooks spoke of fossiles from the Carboniferous, 300 million years ago, that are virtually unchanged in structure; the genus Equisetum might be the oldest surviving genus of plants on earth. There were horsetails 60 feet (18 meters) tall. Today there are still some in Mexico and Central America that grow to 20'. Wow.
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| Equisetum, horsetails |
Patience is an important virtue for gardeners, one that is not praised enough.
Winter ends when winter ends. The last frost is months after it is nice enough to wish to plant marigold seeds and tomatoes. I can't speed it up. Planting too early just kills the plants. So I wait. Like it or not.
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| nice weather but plants not up much (March) |
Patience would make that easier.
When I was first introduced to the important native prairie grasses, I knew nothing about grasses and had no eye for distinguishing characteristics. Side-oats grama was one of the first ones I could recognize. The seeds (technically single-seeded fruits, achenes) hang suspended on a 6-9-inch stalk, different from all the other common prairie grasses. Then there was the mnemonic; I always said to myself, "Them's side-oats, gra'ma." Learning Bouteloua curtipendula was less easy, but there are several important species also in Bouteloua, the word has a nice rhythm to it, and curtipendula means "short-hanging" describing the seeds.
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| sideoats grama, Bouteloua curtipendula |
It was early May at 7000' elevation. We walked out on a trail in Three Sisters Park, a Jefferson County Park, in Evergreen, Colorado. The temperature was in the 50's, the sky overcast with a prediction of rain--very pleasant, actually.
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| forest, Three Sisters Park, Evergreen. CO |
This is the story of a successful native. Beach lettuce, fan flower, Scaevola taccada, grows on beaches across the Pacific Ocean. Called beach naupaka in Hawaii, it is one of about 600 species of plants native to Hawaii, having reached the islands, the most remote in the world, without human help. Since it is found on beaches all over the Pacific, Hawaiians call it indigenous rather than endemic. It is a conspicuous plant to beach-goers, growing abundantly just above the tide line.
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| beach naupaka Scaevola taccada, Honolulu |
I want to praise it for its role as an ornamental.
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| wild lettuce, probably prickly lettuce, Lactuca serriola |
In a spring escape, I was in San Francisco in late March. We visited museums, parks, and restaurants.
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| Roof, California Academy of Sciences |
I had not been to the California Academy of Sciences in more than 20 years. In that period, the building was completely rebuilt, with a green roof. I had been doubtful about green roofs--where people grow plants on the roof. I know they have been used for millennia in parts of Europe, but those are wetter climates than San Francisco. So I wondered about watering and keeping plants alive in shallow soils. Or, if the soils aren't shallow, the weight on the roof.
California false hellebore, Veratrum californicum, is a big plant you can't miss. It is very toxic. Rising temperatures threaten it. Altogether a fascinating native American wildflower.
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| California false hellebore, Veratrum californicum, in the Colorado Rockies |
It was still winter in Colorado in March 2023 when we took off to San Francisco on a California escape. The area had had a stressful winter of heavy rains and our trip was sandwiched in between two more storms. But we had a beautiful day for walking Golden Gate Park.
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| Japanese Tea Garden, San Francisco |
Let us talk about lettuce.
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| garden lettuce, Lactuca sativa, in a garden |
Lettuce is easily overlooked and yet it is one of the top ten vegetables, traded, grown, or eaten. Americans ate an average of 12.7 pounds of lettuce each in 2021 and 25.8 pounds per person in 2015. It is the world's most important salad crop.
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| hellebore, Helleborus |
I attended Landscaping with Colorado Native Plants conference in February. I came away very conscious of all the differences in gardening between our region and other places, especially the eastern U.S. If you want to grow Colorado natives, they recommended planting in a thick layer of crushed gravel (stone!), adding no fertilizer, washing off the potting soil to plant plants bare-rooted, and within a year, reducing water to once per week or once per month or not at all (that is, depending on rain and snow for water).
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| natural vegetation, Colorado grasslands |
We imported our idea of landscape and garden mainly from settlers who came from Kansas or Iowa or Kentucky or Pennsylvania.
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| Lenten rose, Helleborus |
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| Scarlet globe mallow, Sphaeralcea coccinea |
I started this blog in February 2013. I have uploaded a post every week since then, 521 posts. The actual total is 532, because once in a while I added a mid-week post. In that decade I wrote books about conspicuous plants (listed below), gave talks about plants and travel, and, last month, published an historical novel about travel, featuring plants (see below). I learned a lot about writing, publishing, and projectors. I aspired to being an expert on a tour and just before covid, got to try it. Then, of course, I experienced staying in during the pandemic and, lately, reestablishing pre-pandemic activities. My thinking about plants went from considering all plants cool to believing we should make a real effort to grow plants native to our local area to preserve them and the animals that feed on them, which discourages growing nonnative plants.
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| In 2013 I saw the Caribbean for the first time. |
We took a winter escape. To San Diego, California, in January. I knew it could be warm there, but it wasn't. Heavy rain had just swept inland and behind the front the highs barely reached 60 oF. In the sun, it was pleasant, but not very warm.
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| Beach, Coronado Island, San Diego, California |
This is the Buddha's hand citron:
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| Buddha's hand citron, Citron medica var. sarcodactylis |
It rarely appears in North American markets, but is common in Asia.
This is a mint
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| henbit, Lamium amplexicaule |
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| coleus, genus Coleus |
and this is a mint
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| scarlet beebalm, Monarda didyma |
This is also a mint
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| teak, Tectoma |
Wait a minute! All of those? They don't look like spearmint (Mentha spicata)
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| spearmint, Mentha spicata |
