Oh, What’s the Poinsettia?

December 12 is “National Poinsettia Day,” designated as such by an Act of Congress. Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first U.S. Ambassador to Mexico (1825-1829), died on that date in 1851. Poinsett was trained as a physician, but his first love was botany. While botanizing in the Taxco region of Mexico during the winter of 1828 he happened upon a large euphorbia with large red blooms and, entranced by the plant, shipped it back to his own greenhouses in South Carolina.

Joel Roberts Poinsett

Poinsett did not discover the plant. Euphorbia pulcherrima (very beautiful euphorbia) had been named by German botantist Karl Willdenow (1765-1812) in the late 18^th century. Scottish botanist Robert Graham (1786-1845) subsequently created a new genus Poinsettia for the plant. J.B. Klotzsch of the Royal Herbarium in Berlin examined Willdenow’s collection and affirmed the assignment to Euphorbia. Posterity has agreed with Klotzsch, but Graham’s genus became the most widely used vernacular name.

While serving in the U.S. Senate in the 1840s Poinsett was one of a group of gentleman scientists who promoted the idea of “National Institute for the Promotion of Science.” They used £100,000 sterling gift from James Smithson to start what is now the Smithsonian Institution. This does not quite counterbalance his diligence in “Indian removal” in campaigns against the Seminole and Cherokee as Secretary of War in the 1830s, so it perhaps best that he is most often remembered as the man who introduced poinsettia to the United States.

Although most people are familiar with poinsettias as a potted plant purchased before Christmas, in its natural environment it is actually a large shrub or a small tree, growing up to 10 feet tall. It is found from Mexico to Central America and the Andes. The Aztecs called it cuetlayochitl, “mortal flower that perishes and withers like all that is pure,” perhaps in reference to its tendency to drop its leaves when the air temperature fell below 55 degrees.

Actual flower; “cyathia”

The plant blooms between November and March in the subtropics. The showy red “flowers” are not petals but bracts; similar modified leaves also constitute the attractive part of the florescence of Cornus florida, the flowering dogwood. The actual flowers are waxy, swollen tubes lined with red at the distal end.

Poinsett gave away plants to other growers. Many sources claim that Poinsett sent plants to John Bartram, which is unlikely, as he died in 1777 (and his son John Bartram Jr. died in 1812), but his great-grandson John Bartram Carr presided over “Bartram’s Garden,” an arboretum on the Schuykill River near Philadelphia until his death in 1839. In any case, the plants were passed on to Robert Buist, who was apparently the first to sell them commercially.

They remained landscape shrubs until the 1920s, when Paul Ecke of southern California began selling them as cut flowers. It was Ecke who first marketed the plant as a Christmas ornament. In 1923 Ecke moved his operation from Hollywood to Encinitas and focused on poinsettias. He traveled the country teaching other growers how to raise them and encouraging them to market it as a holiday plant.

Landscape shrub in Canary Islands

In 1923 a Mrs. Enteman of Jersey City, New Jersey reportedly raised the first “Oak Leaf” cultivar from seed. This variety did well as a potted plant. Sports and cuttings of these plants sustained the industry until the 1950s, when the USDA in Beltsville, MD and other breeders across the country began developing plants with stiffer branches and longer lasting “blooms,” culminating with the “Paul Mikkelsen” in 1963. Production moved from open field growing to greenhouses.

In the 1960s Ecke Ranch used its location outside of Los Angeles to place poinsettias on the sets of the Tonight Show and Bob Hope Christmas specials, which further cemented the connection of the plant with the Christmas holiday. By 2000 over 65 million plants were being sold nationwide. Hundreds of cultivars are available in various colors, with textured leaves and in miniature form.

Odd Apples to Eat

Members of the Solanaceae family are found throughout the world. Their flowers are generally simple trumpets, but with a large range in size and color. Alkaloids are present in most of these species, which makes them varyingly delicious, allergenic, hallucinogenic, and toxic.

The tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) is a member of the family that has been viewed as nearly all of the above (not hallucinogenic) at one time or another. The center of diversity—and perhaps the point of origin—for the family is the Amazon basin of South America. Two of the more important foodstuffs of Europe, the tomato and the potato (Solanum tuberosum)— had to wait for the Age of Exploration to be brought back to the Old World and integrated into European cuisines. Similarly the eggplant or aubergine (Solanum melongena) originated in the Indian subcontinent, but is now firmly entrenched in many classic European dishes.

Golden apple?

The first description of the tomato in European literature was by botanist Pietro Andrea Mattioli in 1544; he called it the pomo d’oro (“golden apple”), which has since become the name for countless Italian restaurants. As the name suggests, the earliest cultivated tomatoes were yellow. It is not known which European explorer brought them back from the New World, although archaeological evidence shows them to have been domesticated and in widespread use from their point of origin in the highlands of Peru to the heart of Aztec Mexico. The name “tomato” is derived from tomatl from the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs.

Tomatoes were initially viewed with suspicion in much of Europe, in part because their resemblance to (because of their relation to) belladonna or “deadly nightshade” (Atropa belladonna), which is native to Europe and either toxic or hallucinogenic, depending on the dosage and your attitude. Early tomato fruits much more closely resembled the round berries of the belladonna. The Spanish referred to the New World import at pome dei Moro (Moor’s apple), apparently lumping it with all things exotic, and the French initially called it pomme d’amour (love apple), which is probably a misunderstanding of the Spanish, rather than anything to do with affection.

Tomato flowers

Tomatoes were grown as ornamentals in northern Europe for many years before anyone convinced the Europeans or Scandinavians to actually eat them. It was as ornamentals that they traveled to the British North American colonies, although, ever the man of the Continent, Thomas Jefferson is recorded to have been eating them in the 1780s. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries they were available in green, yellow, orange and red varieties, which may have been more of an attraction as an ornamental than their rather small yellow flowers.

Potato flowers are showier and come in a variety of colors, but they were not grown as ornamentals like tomatoes. They did, however, face the same sort of discrimination in northern Europe as their South American cousins. Introduced to Europe in 1536, the potato was brought all over the world by European traders, perhaps because its good long-term storage qualities made useful as a shipboard culinary item. In any case, it was known throughout south Asia by the end of the 17^th century.

Potato flowers

The number of potato varieties if anything outstrips that of the tomato: 5000 worldwide, with 3000 of them in Andes, where it was an historic staple of the Inca diet. The Quechua word papa (potato) was combined with the Taino word batata (sweet potato) to created the Spanish word patata, which found general use in English. The French, who seem to view many round objects as a variety of apple, call them pomme d’terre, “apples of the earth”.

In German and Danish cooking, where potatoes are a staple, it is called kartoffel, which oddly enough, is derived from archaic Italian tartufoli for their odd resemblance to truffles (Italian tartufo), a subterranean fungus of the genus Tuber.

Potatoes are, of course, a nearly ubiquitous feature of Thanksgiving feasts. A few years ago when my wife and I decided to introduce the Thanksgiving meal to some open-minded Danes, we hauled the uniquely North American components—pumpkins (canned), cranberries (fresh) and pecans—along with us on the plane. Turkey is reasonably popular in much of Europe, so that wasn’t a problem, and we assumed that the universal presence of potatoes would make transporting them to Denmark unnecessary.

American spud

As it turns out, Danes don’t mash potatoes. Their supermarkets were full of finger potatoes, small narrow varieties with an enormous amount of starch in them. When we attempted to make the traditional  mashed potato dish with them, it turned into something that more nearly resembled North American potatoes mixed with wallpapering paste. Happily, the Danes didn’t know any better and were intrigued by any departure from simply cutting them up, boiling them and eating them.

Fit To Be Dried

One of the memories that I have from childhood and adolescence is climbing up into the second floor of our barn—it didn’t have a real loft—and seeing bunches of flowers hanging upside down along wires stretched between the roof beams. At some point in the 1970s my mother began growing flowers that were grown to be dried, as opposed to be cut and displayed fresh.

Statice (Limonium sinuatum)

I think that she had joined a garden club and had gotten into flower arranging. In the absence of a greenhouse to grow fresh flowers through the winter, one resorted to arranging dried flowers. One of the most popular species is statice (Limomium sinuatum) or “sea lavender,” which has small flowers surrounded by colorful bracts. When dried the crepe paper-like bracts persist and largely hold their color. Statice is relatively easy to grow, begins flower in the spring and keeps flowering until the frost kills it, and can be grown as an annual in Zones 2 through 7.

Other popular species that dry well include baby’s breath (Gypsophila), cockscomb (Celosia), amaranth (Amaranthus), salvia (Salvia), and goldenrod (Solidago). The simplest way to dry all of these is to hang them upside down in a dry, dark, well-ventilated place like my mother did. Humid places should be avoided, as the plants are likely to get moldy.

Dried goldenrod and hydrangea

If you have taken a botany course, then you are perhaps already aware of pressing flowers in order to preserve them for a herbarium collection. Nearly any flower can be dried in this manner, although many do not retain much color and all are, of course, flattened. Alternating layers of flowers and newsprint are stacked between two boards and weighted down with a heavy object. It takes about a month to dry them in this manner.

Any plant can also be dried by submerging it in two parts water and one part glycerine (antifreeze actually works). Fresh flowers are submerged for two or three weeks and then hung upside down to drive the glycerine to the extremities of the vegetation.

Silica gel will also dehydrate flowers. Packets of this substance are often found in packages that have been shipped long distance. It can be bought at most garden stores. Flowers must be buried in a closed container. Flowers dried by silica gel may rehydrate and wilt if they are not kept in a closed container after initial drying.

Any flower that is cut to be dried should be picked later in the day when the dew has evaporated from it. They should be bound together in bunch with a rubber band and placed in a cool, dark place immediately. It is best to pick flowers before they are fully open, as they will continue to mature after they are cut and before they are fully dried.

Flowers fade because the pigments in them oxidize in the presence of light and water. Drying them in the dark prevents oxidation and thus preserves the color. Subsequent fading of the color in the dried flower is caused by partial rehydration from moisture in the air, which allows the oxidation reaction to go forward.

Dried hydrangeas

Hydrangeas (also known as hortensia) are woody plants that produce beautiful dried blooms. Hydrangea flowers should be allowed to partially dry while still on the shrub. They are initially green, but as they dry, they turn blue (acidic soils) pink, or purple (alkaline soils).

Hydrangea flowers are either “mopheads” or “lacecaps”. The former are round panicles and the latter are flatter corymbs. Often the lacecap flower heads will have smaller, radially symmetrical blooms at the center and larger sterile asymmetrical bracts around the perimeter.

Hydrangeas do not need to be hung upside down to dry. They will dry even if they are put in a vase filled with water.å

Fine Vines

Clematis terniflora

We have two Clematis vines climbing up opposite sites of our front porch. On the west side is Clematis terniflora, or the autumn clematis, which we put in about four years ago. Deirdre was pruning it in the autumn for the first couple of years and then last year didn’t do anything to it. This year it flowered more profusely than ever before and leaped over to the hanging basket and kept going eastward toward the middle column of the porch. It began flowering about two weeks ago and is at its height right now.

On the east side is Clematis tangutica ‘Gravetye Beauty,’ which begins flowering in July and continues through September. By late September all of the blooms are past, but the seed heads are pretty too in an entirely different way. While the flowers are yellow and hang down like paper lanterns, the seed heads are larger with wiry tendrils forming sub-globular balls. As the seed heads age they become frayed and fluffier.

C. tangutica seed heads

Back in Rochester we inherited a few different Clematis species. Some were early summer bloomers, large (~3 inches across) purple or white flowers with six petals. I put up something for them to climb on and after a year of hesitation, they really took off. There was an autumn clematis on the front porch of the Rochester house that had stems that must have been two or three inches thick. It might have been there since the house was built in 1920. It was an event when it flowered each fall; it was much more strongly scented than the one we have here in Trumansburg. The smell itself was a sort of a presence; you’d smell it in the house and it would change your mood for the better.

The trickiest thing about Clematis would seem to be how and when to prune them. There are three categories of this genus that are variously referred to as Groups A, B, and C, or 1, 2 and 3, or by bloom date.

Group A includes the species and varieties that flower in April or May and should be cut back soon after they flower, not later than July. Group B includes large-flowered hybrids that often bloom once in early summer and then again in the late summer. They should be pruned in February or March back to the topmost large, plump buds.

Group C include plants that flower from mid June through the fall. Every source of information that I looked to recommended aggressively cutting them back until they are only two or three feet high. As noted above we didn’t do this and it is flowering very nicely.

Clematis (pronounced by CLEM-a-tis, by the way) are nearly all vines (there are about 250 species and new varieties being developed constantly), so you wouldn’t think they’d make the best cut flowers. Last week Deirdre cut a flower-laden branch of the C. terniflora and laid it in a shallow ornamental bowl so that all the flowers were sticking up out of the water like some many tiny lotuses. It was strikingly beautiful and lasted for about three days.

Autumn clematis

Some people will tell you that Clematis are difficult to grow, but this may be due to a lack of patience or a lack of sunlight on the part of the grower and his site. They like full sun (>6 hours a day). Soil should be rich and well drained with a pH close to neutral (7.0). As they are woody perennials, so they take a few years to get established and may not look like much while they are building a root mass.

Trellises or lattices work well as supports for these vines. They wrap themselves around narrow supports. Our Clematis are actually loosely propped up on porch railings and held against the pillars with some strategic monofilament. They don’t seem to mind. The autumn clematis seems to be growing more rapidly and becoming ligneous and self-supporting sooner than the C. tangutica.

Wetland Flowers at Cayuta Lake

Cayuta Lake is a relatively small lake tucked into the hills of Schuyler County in a region that is either the top of the Southern Tier or the southern edge of the Finger Lakes. The lake covers 588 acres, is two miles long and has a maximum depth of 24 feet. The shoreline is largely privately owned, with many trailers, small cottages and campgrounds lining the eastern shore and larger cottages and houses strung along the western shore. A Department of Environmental Conservation boat launch at the north end of the lake is the only public access to the lake.

Cardinalflower

We put our kayaks in at the DEC ramp in early August and pushed out onto the warm shallow water through the emergent and submerged vegetation, the water itself green with algae and diatoms. We headed east because the rest of the north end seemed relatively undeveloped, with verdant vegetation coming right down to and into the water.

Later research revealed that the undeveloped tract is owned by Cornell University in nearby Ithaca. The James W. and Helene D. Allen Preserve was donated to the university in 1995 and is visited regularly on class field trips because of its “relatively pristine” vegetation and the ecosystem of inlet, which includes rare freshwater sponges.

Even from a distance we could see that the wetland forest was filled with wildflowers, both herbaceous and on the shrubs that formed the understory. The precise position of the shoreline was blurred by the presence of swamp loosestrife, which arched repeatedly outward from dry ground, diving in and out of the water to create a miniature temperate-zone version of a mangrove swamp. The stems were lined with purple conate flowers arranged in clumps at the base of the whorled leaves.

Behind and among the loosestrife tangle grew dogwoods of some kind. They had flowered already, but their berries had not reddened into their autumnal glory. The leaves, however, showed hints of purple to remind us that summer was fading fast.

Swamp loosestrife

Less common than either the dogwoods or the loosestrife were the swamp roses. These were something I had never seen before and it is perhaps a testimony to the undisturbed nature of this tract of land that they are found here. Their flowers were a pale pink that graded to white at the center where the prominent yellow anthers bobbed in the breeze. The roses were about four or five feet tall and seemed restricted to a narrow band just above the shoreline with abundant sunshine making its way under the canopy from the open expanse of the lake.

One flower that we never identified was a large yellow bloom that looked to be in the aster family, perhaps Helianthus. It was three to four feet tall and clearly herbaceous. They seemed to favor the same conditions as the swamp roses, growing among them and being about as abundant.

A really striking part of the palustrine assemblage is the buttonbush. This shrub grows with its feet in the water like the loosestrife, but it is large and woody with strikingly glossy green foliage and globular white flowers. Each bloom is actually made up of innumerable narrow blossoms radiating out from a single center. After flowering the fruit hardens into a rounded disk that gives the plant its name.

Buttonbush

In addition to the terrestrial vegetation the broad shoals of the lake itself were filled with plants including emergents like pickerelweed, which sent its purple spikes at least a foot above the water’s surface, and water lilies, whose white blossoms floated on the surface, and bullhead lilies, their sub-globose waxy yellow flowers hovering a couple of inches above the water.

Beneath the surface the shallows were choked with submerged vegetation, a profusion of milfoils, pondweed and elodea. Many of the Web sites crowing about the excellence of the fishing in Cayuta Lake (we saw them jumping almost constantly), complained about the density of the “weeds” in the lake, which inhibited passage by motorboats in the summer.

Plant Classification Before Darwin

The urge to classify the natural world is an old one and apparently an essential human characteristic. In a famous instance of the primeval nature of this impulse, during his field work in New Guinea in the 1940s ornithologist Ernst Mayr discovered the tribal people had identified the 137 species of birds in detail that equaled and in at least one instance exceeded that of modern science. The sexual dimorphism among birds of Paradise is striking, but the hunters and gatherers almost unfailingly were able to pair dissimilar looking birds under one name.

Theophrastus

The Greeks, the Romans and most Europeans until the Renaissance, assumed that species were static. I.e., one did not evolve from another to produce “family trees.” Rather, the similarities among taxa were thought to be due to variations in the proverbial molds for the creation of “types” in the divine forge. Beginning in the early Hellenic period in Greece (300 B.C.) plants were divided up into taxa based on their habit or life form, grouping vines, shrubs, trees and herbaceous species.

Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle, is often designated as the “father of botany.” He recognized determinate versus indeterminate growth patterns. Determinate growth refers to a plant that attains a particular size and gets no larger, but produces flowers and fruit before dying. Indeterminate growth refers to the habit of growing continually until killed by frost or other means. Theophrastus also grouped plants together according to shared traits, including the fusion of various elements of the flower (and other parts of the plant).

Dioscorides

Pedanius Dioscorides (40-90 A.D.) was a Greek pharmacologist and botanist from Asia Minor (modern Turkey, who practiced in Rome at the time of Nero. He assembled a directory of ~600 plants with medicinal uses into the Materia Medica. The reference was used continually throughout Europe until the 17th century. Dioscorides preserved the names of plants in the Dacian language of southeastern Europe. The true identification of all the plants he listed is not settled unambiguously.

Pliny the Elder

Pliny the Elder was a better-known, older (23-79 A.D.) Roman contemporary of Discorides. His Naturalis Historia is a compendium of the entire natural world, as it was known in his time. Although regarded as generally accurate, it makes no consistent distinction between real and fantastic phenomena. Pliny drew upon the work of Theophrastus for his chapter on botany.

Otto Brunfels

After the Middle Ages, herbalists like Otto Brunfels (~1488-1534) began to publish botanical works that were based almost entirely on personal observation rather than hearsay, which was the primary source of information for the naturalists of the Greek and Roman periods. The herbalist texts included illustrations that reach a new level of accuracy and the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439 assured the wider distribution of accurate botanical information. Multiple schemes of classification persisted throughout the Renaissance and into the Age of Enlightenment.

Joseph Pitton de Tournefort

Andrea Caesalpino (1519-1603), a Tuscan physician and botanist, grouped plants together based on the morphology and arrangement of their fruits and seeds. The herbalists had usually ordered plants in their texts alphabetically and grouped them by medicinal properties. Caesalpino became the director of the botanical garden in Pisa in 1555. In the 16th century period these grounds for growing, displaying and doing research on plants began to be built, first in the wealthy Italian peninsular states and then through the rest of western Europe.

Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656-1708) invented the concept of “genus” as a way of organizing plant species. He assembled over 7000 taxa into 700 genera. His criteria were the shared features among flowers. The post-medieval trend toward field work expanded in the 17th century; de Tounefort traveled and collected extensively in the Pyrennes, throughout the islands of the Mediterranean and much of western Europe.

The work of de Tournefort paved the way for Carl Linné (Carolus Linnaeus) to develop the system of binomial nomenclature. His Species Plantarum (1753) is the basis for much of modern systematics and for the rules of priority. The earliest genus name applied to a plant will generally stay with it forever, unless it can be shown that the plant should be more properly assigned to another genus.

Dead Flowers

Take me down little Susie, take me down
I know you think you’re the Queen of the Underground
And you can send me dead flowers every morning
Send me dead flowers by the mail
Send me dead flowers to my wedding
And I won’t forget to put roses on your grave

Sticky Fingers cover

This song from the Rolling Stones‘ 1971 album Sticky Fingers has a sinister appeal. The initial image conjured by lyrics is of actual dead flowers being delivered through the mail and a withered bouquet arriving at a wedding. But the narrator is entreating “little Suzie” to “take him down,” and he is sardonically observing that this bourgeois woman (in the first verse she is referred to as sitting in a “silk upholstered chair”) thinks of herself as a rough customer (i.e., “the Queen of the Underground”).

It would seem that the narrator is in fact referring to a woman with whom he in the past he regularly enjoyed heroin, and now while he has succumbed to the habit, she has moved on.

Well, you’re sitting back
In your pink Cadillac
Making bets on Kentucky Derby Day
I’ll be in my basement room
With a needle and a spoon
And another girl can take my pain away

The song is the track after “Sister Morphine” on Sticky Fingers, which is in a certain sense a less chilling song because it is so explicitly about sinking down, while “Dead Flowers” has a jaunty swagger to it that belies the delusion represented by the lyrics and the euphemistic name given to the drug.

Undead flowers

Heroin is, after all, made from ground-up dead poppy flowers. Morphine, from which heroin (diacetylmorphine) is derived, is processed from “poppy straw,” the dried seed pods and stems of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum).

Opium has been collected from the latex of unripe seed pods and used medicinal since the Neolithic Period, but morphine was not isolated from the plant until 1803 in Germany. It did not become widely used in medicine until 1853, when the hypodermic needle was invented.

Heroin was synthesized from morphine in 1874 in a London hospital, but was rediscovered independently in 1897 in the laboratories of the Bayer pharmaceutical company in Germany.

Bayer marketed it as a non-addictive cough suppressant and pain killer until 1910, when it was realized that heroin quickly metabolized into morphine, and was therefore essentially a quicker acting version of morphine and one-and-a-half to two times as powerful. (Not to mention very addictive.)

Latex from scored pod

The opium poppies that enter the heroin trade are historically from Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Golden Triangle region of Burma, Thailand and southern China, and the Sinaloa province of Mexico. The ascension of the Taliban in Afghanistan famously suppressed the production of opium poppies in that country. Production had increased during the Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980s, when the US-backed mujaheddin entered the trade in order to raise money for their cause.

The sternly fundamentalist Taliban initially encouraged poppy production because they believed that its products were consumed by Westerners, but not Muslims. In 2000 they reversed their policy and nearly eliminated poppy production within a year. After the 2001 expulsion of the Taliban by the US and Northern Alliance forces, poppy production resumed and Afghanistan once again is the source of the vast majority of the world’s opium supply.

While back in the 1970s, when the Rolling Stones were glamorizing (in their backhanded way of glorifying debasement) heroin use, the purity of the drug was less than it is today. Therefore most users took it intravenously to get the full effect. More recently greater purities are available, making possible significant effects via snorting the drug. Recreational users who believe they might avoid the dangers of the drug in this way, find they are sadly mistaken.

Send me dead flowers by the US mail
Say it with dead flowers at my wedding
And I won’t forget to put roses on your grave
No, I won’t forget to put roses on your grave”

Showing Off the Woodies

Shrubs and trees often have beautiful flowers. Their woody stems give them a certain rigid architectural quality that can serve as a framework for herbaceous, stemmed flowers in an vase.

Hamamelis virginiana

Shrubs begin flowering before leaf out in the spring. Your spring may begin with spicebush (Lindera benzoin), the so-called “forsythia of the woods,” and end with witch-hazel (Hamamelis virginiana), a shrub with flowers that persist after the leaves falls. Between April and November there is a continuous string of flowering woody plants.

The tiny yellow flowers of spicebush have a striking form; they float in the understory of the forest in flat sprays with a single shrub supporting blossoms at many levels. This horizontal arrangement is in marked contrast to the actual forsythia, a so-called “cane shrub.” Its form consists of wands thrown up vertically until they droop under their own weight.

Spicebush is a laurel and that family is noted for its brilliant floral displays. The mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia) is not actually a laurel; it is a member of the heath family (Ericaceae). Ericads like azaleas, rhododendrons, and the mountain laurel are all well know as cultivars, but there are dozens of wild species that may be available from nurseries if you live in an area where landscaping with native plants has caught on.

Rhodora

In the Northeast wild varieties include the flame azalea (Rhododendron calendulaceum), rhodora (Rhododendron canadense), the pinxter flower (Rhododendron nudiflorum), and the great laurel (Rhododendron maximum). The first three are all small deciduous shrubs, but the last is an evergreen that can reach a height of 35 feet.

During the so-called Hypsithermal, or Holocene climate optimum, between 9,000 and 5,000 years before present, many plant and animal species spread northward as part of the recovery from the last Ice Age. The climate has been generally cooler since and many species retreated southward, but left behind “relict” populations in isolated northern areas where the climate was suitable for survival. One example of this is the scattered groves of great laurel that can be found through Connecticut, Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. Rhododendron State Park in New Hampshire preserves the northernmost known site. The 16-acre grove blooms in mid-July.

Cercis canadensis

In addition to shrubs, some small understory trees have striking blossoms. The redbud (Cercis canadensis) is found in the wild north to the Southern Tier of New York, but it (or its Chinese cousin) have been planted extensively as ornamentals and it tends to spread rapidly where introduced. Some of the flowers erupt directly from the wood on fairly old branches, which makes the tree quite a sight when it blooms in May, bright fuchsia flowers against nearly black bark. The flowers are most profuse on the newer growth, where they are arrayed in drooping masses.

When the redbud is fading the lilacs (Syringa vulgaris) begin to take off. Although native to Europe and Asia, lilacs have been popular “foundation shrubs” in the United States since the late 18th century. One can often find them seemingly growing in the wild where a farmstead has burnt down or been abandoned years before and only the plantings and a few stone walls are left. The aroma of lilacs is quite strong and some may find it overbearing in a confined space. The most common colors are shades of purple, but pinks and whites are common as well.

Viburnum plicatum

As the summer progresses the viburnums become prominent. This is a large family and both introduced ornamentals and native species are widely planted. The nannyberry (Viburnum lentago) is a showy native, while Viburnum plicatum is a commonly seen and interesting ornamental from eastern Asia. V. plicatum has corymbs of small white flowers surrounded by larger, showier sterile flowers.

Even larger trees can have showy blossoms worth collecting and putting on display in a vase. Horsechestnuts and buckeyes (Aesculus spp.) have large spikes of white or pink flowers. Tulip or yellow poplars (Liriodendron tulipifera) have subtler yellow and orange cups that do, in fact, resemble tulips. Fruit trees, especially those in the rose family, such as apples, cherries, and peaches, have gorgeous white to pink flowers. The cherry displays of Washington, D.C. and urban Japan are revered and celebrated.

The traditional way to increase the surface area for the absorption of water once a woody plant is cut is to crush the base of the stems above the cut. A florist has recently informed me that this is not actually necessary, but it does work.

Fickle Plant Classification

Alstroemeria saturne

One of the flowers that will live longest after it is cut is the Peruvian lily, or “lily of the Incas”. The blooms will last two weeks in the vase, but the leaves will not, so you are advised to strip off the leaves before putting them in water.

The popular names of this plant are, in this case, more or less accurate. Which is to say, they do originate in the Andes, but they have two centers of diversity: one is a winter-blooming group in central Chile, and the other is a summer-blooming group in eastern Brazil. From these points of origin approximately 90 wild species have developed, ranging from Venezuela in the north down to Tierra del Fuego.

They are also, in fact, lilies. The genus Alstroemeria, after some taxonomic revision over the last decade, has been, placed in the family Alstroemeriaceae. (They were once placed in the Amaryllidaceae with the daffodils.) The family also includes the genera Bomarea, Schickendantzia and Leontochir, and is part of the order Liliales in some taxonomies and included in the order Asparagales (in the class Liliopsida) in others.

Systematics is a part of natural science where controversy will never truly go away. Although all biologists agree that all living species can be traced back to a common ancestor, there is no common, all-inclusive consensus as to how everything is related.

When Linnaeus established the binomial nomenclature in the 18th century and began grouping living organisms together, he wasn’t even thinking of them as having a common ancestor. Rather he was just trying to bring some organization to the classification of organisms. Most Enlightenment naturalists felt that they were in the business of perceiving the logic of the divine plan, not describing a branching evolutionary scheme. It was believed that the similarities among species were a product of variations on themes that existed in the proverbial mind of God. Darwin’s theory of natural selection introduced a mechanism that provided a means for defending the idea that species were similar because of common descent rather than due to repeated tweaking of a heavenly mold.

Through the last half of the 19th century (On the Origin of Species appeared in 1959) taxonomies (i.e. theories of systematics) were based on identification of shared morphological traits. The more traits shared, the more closely related the taxa. The arguments in that era were over which traits were the right ones to use and what weight to give each trait. The early 20th century development of the field of genetics largely verified and clarified the taxonomies of the previous century, but the introduction of molecular genetics in the 1960s and the eventual analysis of shared genes by the 1980s, changed the study of taxonomy.

Willi Hennig

While relatedness was implicit in post-Darwin classifications, the systems were called ‘phenetic’ because they were based on traits that could be observed in organisms, but the ordering of the traits was entirely based on the erudition of the classifier, not a mathematical model. The presumption of evolutionary relatedness was brought to the fore with to the development of cladistics and phylogenetics. Multi-variate statistics were brought to bear on the question of which traits to use and how much weight to give each one. As more powerful computers became more accessible to more people, the analysis of data in this way became more commonplace and the phylogenetic approach became pre-eminent.

Arthur Cronquist

Arthur Cronquist, a botanist at the New York Botanical Garden, developed the most widely used phenetic taxonomy of plants beginning in the 1960s, before the advent of cladistics. He published the first edition of his The Evolution and Classification of Flowering Plants in 1968 (second edition 1988), 11 years before Willi Hennig issued Phylogenetic Systematics, the inaugural work of the cladistics movement. Cronquist’s system is still used by some botanists, but many have adopted the taxonomy of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (APG), which was published in 1998 and revised in 2003 as APG II. The APG system is based on the cladistic analysis of the DNA sequences of three genes, two chloroplast genes and one gene coding for ribosomes. It has drastically revised some parts of Cronquist’s system, particularly his Liliopsida class, which included all the monocotyledon-bearing plants.

The United States Department of Agriculture still uses the Cronquist system and still has Alstroemeria in the Liliaceae, while the Daviswiki, the “creative commons” for the California city that is home to the premier horticultural arm of the state university system, and the Atlas of Florida Vascular Plants keep the genus in the Amaryllidaceae. The International Society of Horticultural Scientists (ISHS), of course, uses Alstroemeriaceae name and is busy working out ‘genetic linkage maps’ among the wild species. The APG II (unchanged from the APG, in this case) recognizes the family and puts it in the order Liliales in the clade monocots.

Big Friendly Flowers

Sunflowers are impressively large. They are probably one of the few flowers–hollyhocks being another–that can frequently be taller than you are–sometimes much taller. These members of the aster family are fast-growing annuals and perennials; some of them can reach 15 feet.

If you are used to seeing sunflowers growing in rows or bunches at the back of flowerbeds, then it is a bit of a shock to see fields of them stretching away into the distance when you first stumble upon a commercial planting of them. Sunflowers (Helianthus annus) were cultivated first by the tribal peoples of the Great Plains.

Helianthus annus

Lewis and Clark wrote of seeing them growing and in use. Archeological evidence indicates they were domesticated and subjected to selective breeding for over 5000 years. Early Spanish explorers of the Great Plains brought the seeds back to the Old World where they became a commercially cultivated crop, initially in Russia, and then throughout Europe. By the early 19th century, as Lewis and Clark walked across the northern Great Plains, witnessing the aboriginal cultivation and use of the plant on its native ground, commercial cultivation in Russia was reaching 2 million acres.

For the first several hundred years of its European sojourn the sunflower was largely grown as an ornamental. In 1716 an English patent was approved for the extraction of oil from the seeds. By the late 18th century commercial cultivation for oil production was in full swing. In addition, to oil production though, another variety was grown for direct consumption of the seeds.

In the late 19th century the sunflower returned to the U.S. from Russia as a commercial crop. The Canadian government took the sunflower quite seriously and began a breeding program in 1930. Through the 20th century the popularity of sunflower oil increased and consequently so did the amount of acreage under cultivation, spreading down from Canada into Minnesota and North Dakota.

The first place that I can recall seeing sunflowers grown commercially was in Germany. In addition to sunflower oil, the Germans are quite fond of grinding up sunflower seeds into a meal and adding it to bread.

Commercial growing

The German fondness for incorporating sunflower meal into bread as spread over the decades into neighboring European countries and is not unknown in the United States.

The mammoth nodding heads of sunflowers (which, most people know, get their name from their heliotropic habit) are not actually single flowers at all. In fact, each ostensible “flower” is composed of two types of blossom. Each apparent petal is actually a single sterile “ray flower,” the primary of which is to collectively attract insects and other pollinators. The “disk flowers,” which fill the region inside the ring of ray flowers are the sexual organs of the plant. Each tiny flower holds both male (anthers) and female (pistil) organs.

Although they contain both genders, sunflowers are self-sterile; the pollen of a given plant needs to be transported to another plant in order for fertilization to take place. In other words, if you wish to your own sunflowers to breed true to variety, you have to grow them several miles from other varieties in order to produce seed that will produce plants that resemble the previous generation. As this sort of geographical isolation is unlikely, you are better off doing the pollination manually.

Manual pollination is done by first insuring that no insect pollination can take place by–just before the disk flowers open–covering the selected flower heads with a bag made of porous material (air should circulate and moisture be allowed to escape in order to avoid mold). After the flowers open and the anthers have emerged, you can brush the pollen off of them into a plastic bag with a paintbrush. Take this pollen to a second plant, dust the pollen off the anthers of that plant into a second bag, and then brush the pollen from the first plant onto the pistils of the second. Repeat the pollen transfer process, brushing the pollen from the second plant onto the flower of the first.