Category Archives: Plants

“In 1932 a commercial partnership began between the Roman Catholic Church and the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation (later known as Motorola). The product was a vacuum-tube radio in a rounded and streamlined Bakelite case. The radio’s brand name, “Mariola”, was emblazoned on the case, right above the speaker grill, in Art Deco slanted lettering with a red heart on either side. The radio was marketed exclusively to Catholic congregations across the United States as well as to missionaries. What made the radio unique was that it would only receive devotional broadcasts…”

Now that can’t be true! It must be one of those net satellite feed issues which happen now and then when the temperature exceeds 95 degrees. Somehow a Wikipedia article from an adjacent timeline shimmers across the divide and I see anomalous HTML docs from a forked-off alternate version of our universe.

What I was looking for was information about Mariola, a wash-side woody plant which is very characteristic of this Chihuahuan Desert Scrub environment, most of which lies towards the south, in northern Mexico and West Texas.

Marioloa (Parthenium incanum) is a shrub in the Asteraceae family with serrated gray-green leaves and inconspicuous white flowers. The pure white of the flowers must have suggested virginity to a taxonomist, as the genus name, Parthenium, comes from an ancient Greek appellation used for presumably virginal goddesses such as Athena. The Parthenon’s name comes from the same root.

A description of the species at the SEInet botanical site contains this equivocal description of the odor of the plant’s leaves:

“Distinctive as a mostly low-growing, gray-green shrub with a strong scent (pleasant to some)…”

The leaves, when crushed, have a sage-like odor with musky overtones. I can never decide if I like the smell or not. During WWII there was a small pilot project somewhere in Arizona, an effort to determine if it was at all worthwhile to extract the two-to-three-percent of latex which the plant contains. Our government was worried about supplies of rubber during that period, as the Japanese had cut us off from Southeast Asian supplies of the commodity. Airplanes and jeeps needed tires! The project was discontinued, as was a similar trial of guayule, another related plant which grows in Northern Arizona.

This morning I was photographing an early-flowering branch of Mariola. While I focused and adjusted the camera Jennifer exclaimed, “Look! There’s another dead jackrabbit right behind the bush!”

You can see that deteriorated and half-consumed carcass in the photo — it’s to the left of the flowering branches. Luckily for faint-hearted viewers it’s out of focus! That jackrabbit is about the fifteenth dead one we’ve encountered in the past month. They are victims of a viral pandemic affecting both tame and wild rabbits. The disease was first noticed in this county in March.

According to some ethnologists who visited remnant Apaches back in the 1930s fresh Mariola leaves were boiled for a coffee-like hot drink which they called “gaxe”. I gathered a pocketful of Mariola leaves before we returned to the house, and this afternoon I boiled them in a quart of water. Aside from excessive bitterness it didn’t really taste bad — perhaps an infusion would be better. I did wonder about the advisability of drinking something which contains latex!

It’s easy to ignore common plants, just as it’s easy to ignore people en masse. The eye becomes surfeited easily and novelty is required to revive our flagging attentions.

This tendency can be fruitfully resisted, I’ve noticed. Magnification helps. I’ll shoot a few photos while out walking, then later find unexpected aesthetic delights lurking in the bundles of pixels disgorged into a USB cable.

The California Poppy is a common spring flower here in Bisbee. Our sub-species (Eschscholzia californica ssp. mexicana) is a strong clear yellow with just a hint of orange, unlike the orange-yellow form found in California. The plant grows from sidewalk cracks where there is sufficient sun. The foliage is a distinctive shade of blue-green. So far I’ve seen just two clumps in bloom, but I’ve noticed hundreds of plants girding their vegetative loins for the big reproductive push. The plants bloom sporadically for a month or two, but eventually the severity of the midsummer sun will sear the ferny foliage into green dust.

A couple of morning shots:

Larry

Phenology is an old-fashioned discipline, dependent as it is upon an observer staying in one place for several years. Who does that any more? I did for quite a few years, but for the time being I’m unmoored.

You could think of phenology as a blend of chronology, accounting, and natural history. It boils down to keeping records of when certain natural events happen each year in a certain place. The observer, of course, must be able to differentiate species of plant and animals; otherwise the records would be completely subjective and difficult to share with other record-keepers. Linnaeus’s wonderful idea lives on!

In the pre-computer era (most of human history) phenological observations were kept in notebooks. Aldo Leopold and his family wrote their observations in the day-squares of a large calendar, another common approach. A year-end task was transcribing those notes to a notebook so that the calendar could be disposed of.

I must confess that any phenological observations I make are a byproduct of photography. How fortunate that digital photographs, like all computer files, are intimately associated with their date of creation!

Here’s my slender contribution to Southeast Arizona phenology.

The desert spring is quite unlike those of northern climates. Many of the trees (including many oaks) are evergreen here, so there isn’t the dramatic budding, unfolding, and awakening I grew up with. Many of the plants here wait for the late-summer monsoon rains to make their growth. Still, there are a few spring ephemeral plants. One of them is the Golden Corydalis (Corydalis aurea), a beautiful and dainty plant closely related to the Dutchman’s Breeches and Bleeding Hearts common in Eastern woodlands and gardens.

I first saw and photographed this Corydalis last spring, and I had a vague idea or hunch that the flower bloomed earlier last year. Sometime in early March, I was certain, but only the existence of the photos I shot last year provided me with evidence of the flowering date. Here’s a close-up I shot last year on March 6th:

This year the plants waited two weeks longer to bloom; I shot these photos a couple of days ago, on March 19th:

Naturally I wonder about the possible reasons for the delay. We did have an unusually chill and snowy winter. Many spring ephemeral plants bloom when the soil has warmed sufficiently. Now I wish I had records for previous years!

Larry

Last spring while driving from Illinois to Arizona I began to notice a peculiar plant along the highways. Starting in central Oklahoma what looked like thistles began to appear, but rather than the typical purplish-red star-burst thistle flowers, these plants had large flowers with papery white petals. I eventually learned that these prickly plants were in the genus Argemone, and that they are commonly known as Prickly Poppies.

The species I’ve become familiar with here in Arizona is Argemone pleiacantha, the Arizona or Southwestern Prickly Poppy. It is common in overgrazed rangeland and in other disturbed sites such as roadsides.

One day last month I happened to be hiking through some BLM grassland in the shadow of the Dragoon Mountains. The leased range-land didn’t seem too healthy. The remaining grass was mostly a species which cattle disdain, possibly because of the insidious augur-like seeds which seemed to delight in burrowing into socks. I encountered several withered prickly poppies in that stretch of level grassland, as cattle don’t like that plant either. The Argemone seedpods were open and I had my first encounter with the seeds. I knelt down, split open a few pods and examined the contents.

Prickly Poppies are in the Poppy Family (the Papaveraceae), so I wasn’t surprised to see that the seeds looked like the familiar culinary poppy seeds from plants in the genus Papaver. Argemone seeds are about twice as large, though, and have an interesting surface texture. Here’s a shot of a pod with its seeds spilled out into my palm, which bears abrasions from a struggle with an enormous thicket of thorny “Wait-a-minute” acacia shrubs. Cattle avoid those wicked shrubs too!

A closer view of the seeds, which taste like commercial poppy seeds:

It’s easy to ignore common roadside weeds, but we may as well get used to them as people and roads proliferate unchecked. I like to see rare native plants as well as the next amateur botanist, but I also enjoy the neglected but ecologically adaptable plants as well!

Larry