Category — Flowering plants (that aren’t bulbs)

One of the reasons I coveted this plant was the memory of some friends here, years ago, who had a beautiful garden. Papaver orientale was one of their volunteer plants; it came up and gave a fine bright display every late spring without any care or watering whatever.

Since I’m easily infatuated by plants that give joy with little or no work from me, I took note. Papaver orientale was a plant to covet; reading catalogues, I found the lovely salmon-pink Victoria Louise, and knew she was it.

I’ve recently found that this casual use of oriental poppy wasn’t original with my friends. In 1874, The Journal of Horticulture, Cottage gardener, and Country Gentlemen said, ‘The double varieties of Papaver orientale, of which there are many colors, are very ornamental, and are useful for sowing in rough corners, where they often make a display without trouble.’

It’s interesting to know there were double versions of this poppy back then; I haven’t seen any modern ones.

But perhaps they are in the phenomenal list of Papaver orientale provided at Plantaholic. Until I read the Plantaholic site, I hadn’t realized there were quite so very many oriental poppy varieties; they have 150 types, and breeders are working all the time, making sturdier stems, longer flowering, and a list of other desirable traits.

To me, the most desirable traits of Papaver orientale are their toughness (a zone range from 3 to 9 helps testify to that), their beauty, and their willingness to bloom freely without extra water from me.  An extra bonus is some of their medicinal qualities; studies   show that Papaver orientale can act as a central nervous system depressant and stimulant; that it’s a sudorific (that means it makes you sweat) and good for heart tumors. (Just a reminder: Papaver orientale is not the poppy that opium comes from. That’s another species, Papaver somniferum.)

Papaver orientale is easy to grow with little or no water because it’s another Mediterranean plant; the Mediterranean has the same rainy winters and dry summers my area does. In its wild form, Papaver orientale is native to northwestern Iran, northeastern Turkey, and the Caucasus: Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia.

According to Digging Dog nursery, the variety ‘Victoria Louise’ goes back to 17th century Armenia. I wasn’t quite sure, though, if they were referring to this cultivar or Papaver orientale in general. It seems to me that there would be much earlier records on Papaver orientale than that, since the Emirates and the Ottoman Empire (which once encompassed all these countries) were plant-mad cultures. Our own garden records are often so eurocentric that they disregard the work of other cultures altogether, so it’s hard to know.

In any case, this western Asian plant has made itself so at home in North America that, in some places, it has naturalized. (I’ve never seen this, but it was on the government botany site, so it must be right, right? Has our government ever lied to us?)

If you get seeds, I would follow nature’s advice and plant them in fall. I was lucky enough to get my plant from a local grower (that means I’m more likely to get a plant that does well in my area); I have such a small garden, I often get only specimens of each plant. It seems silly to buy seeds if I want only one.

Papaver orientale is a tough plant; its zone range testifies to that: zones 3 to 9. It does need some winter chill to do well, so it might have a hard time in climates that get any warmer.

Each flower gave a little extra show; after the petals drop, the puffy almost-furry flower center looks like a flower in itself (a scabiosa on steroids, maybe).

One of the things that helps Papaver orientale be so water-thrifty is its fleshy taproot, which acts both as storage for moisture and a deep-level moisture extractor. I have been known to water poppies if we have a warm spring spell, just so they last longer, but it’s not necessary for plant survival.

The One Stop Poppy Shoppe (more on this below) says that Victoria Louise goes well with rose-red, violet-blue, and soft blue. I also found that it went very nicely in a container with silver-green wormwood (Artemesia absinthium), another plant that needs very little water to thrive (and can survive with none). Both plants also need good drainage, a very common requirement for plants who sail through dry summers without water.

Easy, flashily beautiful, and water-saving: Victoria Louise is a good candidate for a water-saving garden, in containers and out of them.

Poppy bonuses:

One Stop Poppy Shoppe  This link will get you to their multitudinous oriental poppy seed selection, but they have  many species and varieties. Fun to browse.

Sylvia’s black-and-white oriental poppy

I didn’t find Lewisia cotyledon in my Sierra Wildflowers book, but I did find that the genus is named for Captain Meriwether Lewis, of Lewis and Clark. It’s in the Portulacaceae, or purslane family.

Of course these plants were well-known to those who already lived where they grew. In the Pacific Northwest, some species were used as food, but they had to be specially cooked to remove bitterness.

There are several different species, and my Lewisia cotyledon is native to a very specific spot, the mountainous pine belt of Trinity and Siskiyou counties, in northern California, where it grows at 4,000 to 7,500 feet (about 1,220 to 2,134 meters). I got it through a local nursery that specializes in unusual plants, including natives, and gears its selection to plants that do well in our area (another plug for local nurseries; for expertise, selection, and quality of plants, they just can’t be beat. The prices are usually better, too.). My own climate is similar enough that Lewisia cotyledon (it doesn’t have a common name) does well here.

But I was quite surprised to find Lewisia on a British blog, Snappy Croc’s Gardens. Much as I love this blog, it only lets you search the archives by the current month, or by the year. I wasn’t willing to go through three months’s worth of 2008, so I don’t know the variety of Lewisia that was grown there; I just remember seeing the picture of flowers that looked awfully like the plant I had just bought, and being amazed it was apparently popular in rainy England. For Lewisia, like most natives here, is used to dry summers and lots of drainage. Perhaps some of the Northwestern varieties are more water-loving.

My Lewisia (and apparently most of them) has a rosette of fleshy, succulent-like leaves, a typical water-saving device for plants.

When it’s not flowering, this makes Lewisia an inconspicuous plant, which is why, I’m hoping, I didn’t know that there is a species which is native to my own county (Lewisia cantelowii). I’ve never seen it in my rambles, but now I’ll look.

The plant is only about a foot tall when it is flowering, according to the books; the ones I’ve seen, including my own, are more like six to eight inches (about 15 to 20 cm). It has a fleshy taproot – another water-conserving device, and a good way for mountain plants to anchor themselves in stony soil.

Supposedly these plants bloom in June and July, but their altitude range means that they are actually growing in several different climates, from hot foothill chapparal to alpine mountains, where you can still find snow in June. In my area, they’re flowering in May.

Given that Lewisias seem to be versatile, they probably fit into a number of gardening climates. They aren’t a showy plant, but they have lots of charm, and make a great, easy-care low-water plant in pots or in the ground.

In the U.S., April 15th is Tax Day. Here’s a letter from Sylvia, with a more interesting puzzle than, “Where did I put that form?”

Dear Pomona,

While on holiday last March in North Wales, I saw a plant. I had never seen this plant before, are you like me, intrigued by a plant? We were visiting  Bodnant garden, this is a large garden about 80 acres with stunning mountain views and lots of plants beautifully grown in wonderful settings.  I saw this plant in several shady places, I liked the lacy white flowers, the early flowering and heart shaped green leaves.  I thought I want this plant but what is it!  All I could do was take this picture to identify it later.

A few days later we visited Crug Farm which is a nursery with a small shady garden attached. They specialise in plants they have bought back from their plant hunting expeditions.  Often the plant labels note when and where the plants were collected, we have been here several times.  In the garden I saw the plant and learnt its problem … a long unpronounceable name and no common name, but none the less Pachyphragma macrophyllum came home with me!

This picture was taken on holiday before we carefully transported it back to Dorset and there it stayed in it pots for over a year, now I have a new shady bed to put it in.  It is still an “it”, I can’t remember that name!  The next 3 pictures were taken this March, after it flowers its leaves are useful ground cover and to set of other plants. It did die back in winter but was very early to produce its leaves.

Looking this up on the internet it is described as: weed-smothering (gets out of control?); veins and stems become purple tinted in winter (see pictures).  flowers followed by small fruits (seeds?); height about 12 inches and hardy (one reference to zones 5-9).  In a few years I will be able to give my own assessment of this plant but first I must get “it” out of its pot and into the ground.

Do you know this plant? I am hoping someone grows it and can tell me their experiences. Where you live it may be a common garden or native plant. Perhaps you have a name that I can pronounce and remember. I would appreciate any ideas you have as to what plants to put with “it”, in my new shady bed, either to complement it in spring or to use the green leaves to set of other plants for the rest of the year.

Best wishes Sylvia (England)

Manzanita may be common; it may be shrubby; it may even be a fire hazard. But it’s beautifully useful all year long, and throughout its hardy, persistent life. I’ve written here about other, high-mountain manzanitas; everything I wrote there about uses of the leaves and berries applies to our local foothills white-leaf or ghost manzanita, perhaps even more, since our manzanita is a bigger shrub. (While you’re looking, don’t forget to check out Steve’s useful comment on cultivating manzanitas below the “berries” link).
Since it’s native to our clay-and-granite, no-summer-water climate, it’s obvious that manzanita is one tough customer. They’re called “ghost manzanitas” because of one of three water-saving tactics of the foliage: the tough, leathery leaves keep evaporation to a minimum, and their vertical posture, with the thin edge toward the sun, reduces it even more. The light-grey-green color reflects sunlight that would steal moisture by transpiration. (Other manzanitas have brilliant green leaves.) Ghost manzanita leaves caught in the headlights, or by a full moon, shine like silvery phosphorescence.

My first introduction to manzanita was as the firewood that burns even when it’s wet. Since I’d ignorantly been trying to burn wet punky pine and other non-starters to keep warm, this was a revelation. Manzanita not only burns wet, it burns so hot it can warp your stove and make the wall behind it smolder. In a campfire, violet and electric blue streak up in the flames along with the more ordinary yellows and oranges.

Manzanita is colorful even when you don’t burn it. Some get big enough to look very like their sisters, the madrones.The bark is a smooth deep mahogany purple-red, and plum-violet and rosy-rust streaks can be found inside most splits of firewood. (I knew a man who carved them into beautiful spoons.) It’s not always easy to find manzanita big enough to split; it’s a shrubby tree, whose trunks often split up and get no bigger around than my arm at the very very bottom.

This photo also shows another characteristic of manzanitas: living and dead wood cohabit. Manzanitas are what I call death-and-resurrection trees. You can find dead and live wood on the same branch, and you can find many dead branches on a healthy living manzanita. Live branches and saplings are tough, long,  and flexible; I used them to build a wickiup when I first came here, and it seems likely to me that the Maidu might have used them for their own dome-like structures, built partly underground for insulation.

Our large masses of manzanitas  were a major food crop for the local Indians, and they must have been an important one, since the tasty acidic dry berries ripen starting in late spring and stay on the bushes well into the beginning of winter. My friend who’s learning Maidu says that she thinks the name for manzanita is “epuh”; the Maidu word for apple is “eppoli”, and this is a diminuitive. (She’s not absolutely sure about this; I’ll confirm it in a comment on this post when I check with her teacher in a few weeks.) It’s the same in Spanish; “manzanita” means “little apple”. All you have to do is take a look at the fruit to know why.

Manzanita berries are still a major food crop for bears and coyotes, who exhibit the evidence in their scat. If you want to experiment with manzanita berries, and don’t have acres of manzanitas out your back door, Steve (his comment is on the bottom of the page this link takes you to) says that watering them will give you bigger crops of berries.

Since we have huge tangled colonies of manzanita here, it’s hard work to clear out the dead parts; manzanita branches start within a few inches of the ground. You have to crawl on your belly with branches snaring your hair, clothes, and tender body parts to get through manzanita settlements, and sometimes it’s impenetrable no matter which way you turn through the maze.

Eventually, the whole thing dies, and you get brushpiles like this, which are a considerable fire hazard. I once made a privacy fence by crudely interweaving these dead branches; it was a great rustic climbing fence for vines, and easy to take down when it was time to move. Dead manzanita branches are also prime kindling, but since we have so much of manzanita everywhere, they are often bulldozed up and disposed of in burn piles.

While it’s certainly faster, easier, and cheaper to do a wholesale clearing on large acreage, you don’t have to raze manzanita to make it safer for fires. Some prefer to clear by hand, leaving selected trees which are limbed up, so they make sculptural shapes which don’t allow potential fires to jump from crown to blazing crown. It also allows the trees full scope to shape themselves as  specimen plants, unhindered by close-growing others.

It was spring when  I was first introduced to manzanita, the time when the pale-pink flowers dangle from the jade-green leaves like  earrings. Manzanita flowers are our first sign of spring – they bloom in February through April, depending on the year and location – and scent the air with a high, light sweetness on sunny days. Hummingbirds and bees buzz out of the woodwork to sip the blooms, and it isn’t just the birds and the bees doing it. I knew an herbalist, when I first came up here, who showed me how to extract a single drop of nectar from the newly-opened flowers. “Put it in a little vial, and share it with someone you love,” he said. The sweet nectar has an astringent aftertaste, not only a reflection of the tannic acid in the leaves, but possibly a commentary on other kinds of sweetness,  on the need for contrasts.

As a flower essence (a homeopathic remedy that addresses emotional conditions, different from an essential oil), manzanita encourages groundedness and an appreciation of the delights of being in a body. Maybe that herbalist was on to something.

Like the high-mountain manzanitas, ghost manzanita is related to heather, uva-ursi, wintergreen, and madrone, all of which share the same kind of flower. It’s typically called urn-shaped, although I’d say that’s for lack of any better description. Whatever the best name for the shape, it’s designed to keep the sexual parts of the flower protected from wind and weather, and give insects protection while they pollinate.

Manzanita provides food, medicine, construction material, fine carving material, firewood, beauty, and an impetus for love. One of our most generous and versatile plants,  it holds up our hard clay foothills from erosion and gives us one of our first hopes of spring.

I think we’ve gotten so used to forysthia we often forget to look at it. Some people are so bored by it, they don’t want to look at it.

But forsythia is worth looking at closely, for its ancient history and medicinal uses, and for its own sake in the present, paying special attention to how the light radiates through its massed petals. Forsythia makes a cheering blaze against a stormy sky, and a radiant force in sunlight.

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Forsythia, named for English plantsman William Forsyth, must have had many names before we got to it: it’s a longstanding staple of the Chinese materia medica (list of medicinal remedies). While we plant forsythia for the flowers, forsythia was probably originally cultivated as a medicinal plant (or maybe for both reasons; before the concept of ornamental gardens, people didn’t feel obliged to make that distinction). The medicinal part of forsythia is its inconspicuous fruit. It’s a traditional Chinese remedy for all kinds of overheating: toxins, fever, swollen lymph glands, flus, and other inflamations. It’s also used to relieve carbuncles (staph abscesses that go deeper and get larger than boils) .

If you want to experiment with forsythia fruit tea, pick the fruit while it’s green.  But that’s just beginning of the process. Chinese herbology, unlike European herbology, wasn’t interrupted by a few hundred years of practitioners being burned, tortured, and otherwise persuaded not to pursue their art. So Chinese herbology has had the time to develop highly complex ways of extracting active herbal ingredients. Here’s what one Chinese materia medica recommends for processing gardenia fruit: “The green fruit gathered in the period of White Dew (fifteenth solar term) is better than the yellow fruit picked in the period of Cold Dew (seventeenth solar term). The fruit is steamed, dried in the sun, and its seeds separated from the flesh.” (TCM Basics)
Combined with other herbs, forsythia fruit is part of formulas for a number of what the Chinese call heat-related conditions (interesting in a plant that’s famous for blooming while it’s still cold). Forsythia is contraindicated where there is deficient yin, or spleen disorders. Mixed with honeysuckle flowers and ground into a powder (yep, plain old ubiquitous Hall’s honeysuckle), forsythia fruit can be used for what western medicine calls upper respiratory tract infections, acute bronchitis, acute endometriosis, measles, acute tonsilities, encephalitis B, meningitis, and parotitis – as well as the ever-present flu.
The variety of forsythia that’s used medicinally is Forsythia suspensa, the weeping forsythia. I’m honestly not sure if the pictures on this post are F. suspensa or something else; it’s my neighbor’s bush, and it was there before she moved in, so she has no way of finding out. It isn’t a particularly weeping form, but there is a variety of F. suspensa, ‘Fortunei’ (most likely named after Robert Fortune, the Royal Horticulturalist Society’s plant collector in 1840s China) which is more upright, and F. suspensa does seem to be the popular choice for specimen (as opposed to hedge) planting. If there are any forsythia experts out there, please let me know.

References:

The World in Your Garden, Camp, Boswell, and Magness, National Geographic Society, 1957

Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons Complete Home Medical Guide, Montague Books, 1985

Sacred Lotus

TCM Basics

Your Nature, Your Health: Chinese Herbs in Constitutional Therapy, S. Dharmananda, Ph.D., Institute for Traditional Medicine and Preventive Health Care, 1986

Sunset Western Garden Book, Lane Magazine and Book Co., 1973 (there are many useful editions of this book)