Category — Plant uses

Sacred plant. Noxious weed. Beautifier of the poor. Devil’s drug. People have a lot of takes on morning glories.

The Aztecs called a related morning glory, Turbina corymbosa, ololiuqui, and put it in their sacred paintings. It was considered a male plant, one which had a close connection with the female plant called Mother of Water (botany unknown). Zapotecs grind seeds of  Ipomoea purpurea  species together with Turbina corymbosa–or they did as of a few decades ago. The meal is soaked in water, and the infusion is taken by shamans to divine the cause of an illness, a disturbance in town, or find a lost object.

In high school, my friends and I put morning glory seeds in a blender with some water. The resulting mess provided us with no more cosmic result than nausea. It’s likely that the active ingredients need to soak to be extracted by water. It’s also true that plant drugs taken in a sacred setting behave differently than ones that are not. Teenagers trying to get high in the kitchen while the parents are away is not perhaps the most sacred of settings.

While we were doing that, other people were trying their best to keep morning glory plants entirely out of their orbits. They were pests, noxious weeds, something that could take over a field. “There are three annual Morning-glory species that infest fields and gardens throughout the greater part of the United States,” cautions Edward Rollin Spencer, in no flattering tones.

Clearly this is an eastern U.S. book. Out here in dry-summer territory, it’s easy to get rid of morning glories: don’t water. That and a freeze pretty much takes care of it.

But in the fertile, rained-on fields east of the Rockies, morning glory seems to have felt like an ever-present danger to Spencer. Even his translation of the Latin name sounds nasty. “…Ipomoea is from the Greek and means wormlike…Purpurea…means purple. So Ipomoea purpurea L. means the purple-flowered plant that crawls like a worm.”

Actually, the proper name may be Ipomoea violacea. I was unable to discern which is most current, but since my handy at-home reference, J.L. Hudson, uses purpurea, that’s what I’m using here. Purpurea or violacea, it means the same thing.

“Like snakes, those slender vines crawl up over the plants they select for their trellises, and soon the big Morning-glory leaves are shading the leaves of the trellising plants, and very soon after that those glorious flowers will be smiling on all the world like a big woman obstructing the view of a small boy at the movies.”

Sinister.

Next post: Beautifier of the poor, and devil’s drug.

REFERENCES:

Richard Evans Schultes and Albert Hofmann, Plants of the Gods, Healing Arts Press, 1992

William Emboden, Narcotic Plants, Collier Books/Macmillan, 1979, pg. 95-97

Edwin Rollin Spencer, All About Weeds, Dover edition 1974; originally published 1940, 1957 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, pg. 188

I felt little hard things hitting me on a mountain walk with a friend one year. I turned around, and he was laughing; he’d been throwing acorns at me. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that those plants were oaks. Waist-high bushes? Leaves that looked, not like lobed deciduous oak trees, or even like the different forms of live-oak leaves, but, well, like huckleberries. I’d just never noticed the acorns. I mean, does this look like an oak to you?

I think part of my problem was that shrubby bushy things just didn’t get my attention the way flashier plants do. It’s only fairly recently that I’ve come to appreciate foliage en masse–leaves that aren’t unusual close up,  like grapes or gooseberries, but make a great effect massed together. It’s probably something psychological, as if I was looking for the individual, but wasn’t interested in the community. Something like that.

It’s also just that I never imagined there could be an oak that comes only to my waist.  It’s the same high-mountain variation as the manzanitas, only in this case the leaves are entirely different from any other oak. But since I’ve read up on this, I’ve found there is another oak in the desert southwest which is called “shin oak” (Quercus mobriana) because it grows in thickets that are about knee-high. I’d imagine that this oak has adapted to severe desert conditions in the same way huckleberry oak has learned to grow in high altitudes.

Like the other high-mountain plants, huckleberry oak has a short time to make its growth and produce fruit. The catkins come out in May or June, when there is often still snow on the ground (in a heavy winter, quite a lot of it).  I took photos of these acorns in early to mid-September, and as you can see, a lot of them are still quite green. They had about six weeks to two months before the first serious snowfall. (I have seen snow sticking in September at this altitude, but it doesn’t really settle in until later.)

Many of these oaks just had empty acorn caps, and I’m guessing the critters harvested the ripe ones right away. While Native Americans used acorns as a staple food, I’m wondering if they would have left these thumbnail- to fingernail-sized acorns for the chipmunks, squirrels, and other rodents? I’m not sure about this, since there are grinding holes in the high altitudes.

Grinding holes are deep round bowls in the rocks, a sort of natural mortar made by using smaller rocks as pestles. In my area, they are called acorn holes: the assumption is that they were used for grinding acorn meal, a large staple. But maybe that wasn’t their only use.  Manzanita berries are also a huge crop in my area, and the tribes here ground them to make different kinds of food. Would the high-mountain grinding holes have been used for the high mountain manzanita berries (some of which mature earlier), but not oaks?

That might be the case, because the indigenous people moved down the hill in the colder weather, which would have coincided with acorn harvest at lower altitudes. Further down the hill, acorns come off large trees, plentiful, much bigger,  and easier to harvest. But I don’t really know.

I was interested to find that some of these bizarre miniature (as I think of them) huckleberry oaks have wasp galls, just like their larger cousins down the hill. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a decent shot of the oak galls. This kind looks like a strange swelling on the branches, about the size of a jawbreaker (or a large hazelnut): round, cream-colored, and hard, with a textured pattern weirdly like an acorn cap.

The galls are made by a type of gall wasp, Cynips maculipennis. They burrow into the branches and lay their eggs. I’m not sure exactly how the gall forms, but the larvae live in it until they are ready to hatch. According to my natural history books, they sometimes lay eggs on other plants, but I have only seen their galls on oaks.

My gardening lesson? To look more carefully at the plants around me. I might actually recognize them. And maybe the lesson huckleberry oak has for all gardeners is: look for different forms of plants. They may work in your garden better. Or they may just be interesting to know about. All gardeners like to contemplate the infinite variety of the plant world. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be gardeners.

References:

Tracy I. Storer and Robert L. Usinger, Sierra Nevada Natural History,  University of California Press, 1963 (There is a newer version out, but this is the one I still own and use.)

Elmer L. Little, The Audobon Society Field Guide to North American Trees: Western Region,  Alfred A. Knopf, 1980

They say that datura’s intoxicating.

Well yes, it is. Is that bad?

Well, it is bad if you’re taking datura leaves internally. Or even if you make a paste and spread them on your skin. You can have respiratory failure, which in plain English means you stop breathing.

In the U.S. Pharmacopoeia of the 1800s, smoking datura leaves (a less drastic way of introducing the alkaloids to your body) was prescribed for asthma. So if you get it just right, instead of stopping breathing, you can stop from breathing fast and spasmodically. I wouldn’t recommend trying this at home, though. Remember, “intoxication” comes from the same root as “toxin”.

Eating datura, or rubbing a paste or salve on your skin, can have multitude of effects. You can hallucinate most unpleasantly, and be very sick to your stomach, for a very long time. Daturas can be used by experts to good effect-some tradtional healers have different kinds of datura or brugmansias growing in their yard. Each variety is good for divining a particular problem or illness in the village. Datura is said to be an herb used by European witches (who were, generally, shamans who were demonized by the Church) to travel to other realms and learn wisdom. In India, daturas are also regarded as sacred.

In fact, wherever it appears, datura is regarded as a holy plant. But holy means powerful. I have known datura to drive a person in a delicately balanced state over the edge, so there was no better solution than an institution. Treat daturas with respect. If you don’t know what you’re doing, back off.

But not too far.

Datura flowers can send me into an altered state even when they’re dead, as in the photo at the top of this post. And it’s a very pleasant sensation.

The slow bursting from velvety buds, the tight scroll unfurling in the evening, is a spectacular show.

And when the huge flower fully opens, you can bury your face deep within it. To me, it’s like a combination of fresh line-dried laundry, a hint of lemon, a whisper of sweet orange blossom, and a touch of something else.

Whatever it is, inhale it while you can, because by late morning, the flowers will be done.

Fortunately, there are more to come.

Next post: I go on about this datura

This flower may look very like the one in my last post.

But wait. Check out the leaves. This is a fig-leafed hollyhock, a different variety from all the hollyhocks we have discussed before.

Then check out the edges of the flowers: they’re pinked. Just another of the mutations hollyhocks seem to specialize in.

This plant is probably some hybrid of Alcea ficifolia (fig-leafed hollyhock) and Alcea rosea (all the other hollyhocks we’ve been looking at in this series). I’ve never grown the species version of Alcea ficifolia, but two sources tell me it has pale yellow flowers. (Maybe Chater used some ficifolia blood in the flower that became ‘Peaches ‘n’ Dreams’.)

Since hollyhocks seem to be given to variation, a lot of interbreeding has probably gone on over the years, with human help or without it. (Remember the bees I talked about a couple of posts ago? They are the ones who are responsible for most of the hollyhock breeding down the centuries.) Wuv’n Acres has a Black Cherry fig-leafed hollyhock, plus a multicolored mix of fig-leafed hollyhocks called ‘Happy Lights’. Select Seeds also carries ‘Happy Lights’, among other hollyhocks which include another species, Alcea rugosa.

Alcea rugosa is rumored to be a longer-lived perennial than the rosea types. (It’s also rumored to be from Russia, and since I read about this in the Plant Delights catalogue as well as another source, I’m willing to accept that. Provisionally.) Presumably it has wrinkled leaves, since that’s what ‘rugosa’ means. According to Plant Delights, it’s 6-7 feet tall, has typical Alcea rosea foliage, and blooms “all summer with large 4-inch single buttery-yellow flowers.” It’s also supposed to be more disease-resistant than other varieties.

The last species I’ve heard of is Alcea setosa, another one with yellow blooms. I don’t know of any more detailed descriptions or pictures of this type. Just the name and the yellow flowers.

All right. These are little-known varieties of hollyhocks (and you might rightly say that, after reading this, you still know very little about them).

What are the little-known uses of hollyhocks? I’ve already discussed how hollyhocks have been used for food and medicine. But did you know they were once under consideration as a fiber crop plant?

In 1821, 280 acres of land near Flint (England) were sown with hollyhocks, in order to use the fiber of stems like hemp or flax. Since cotton was very fashionable as dress material in the early 1800s, it was a major import crop for England at that time. I’d guess that this was an attempt to produce fiber locally and reduce dependency on cotton shipments from India and the southern U.S. Something along the lines of modern attempts at reducing dependency on foreign oil by producing local power.

In fact, hollyhocks are related to cotton (Gossypium herbaceum), though, of course, we get cotton from the fluffy innards of the seedpods, not from the stalks of the plant.

In any case, hollyhock fiber was not a success with 1821 technology. It might be possible today, given that we have created fibers out of bamboo and wood. Maybe it’ll be the next designer material.

The Great Hollyhock Experiment wasn’t entirely futile. In the process, the growers discovered that hollyhock flowers produced a blue dye, “as good as indigo”—the best blue dye at the time. Since indigo requires a lot of time-consuming and smelly processing (hint: large fermenting vats are involved), I was a little surprised that nobody followed up on the possibilities of dyeing with hollyhock flowers, which would not have needed nearly so much processing. Especially since indigo was another one of the big cash crops of the era. (It was grown in the southern U.S. on big plantations that depended on slave labor, much like cotton, tobacco, and rice.)

Maybe the experimenters were so discouraged and discredited that they didn’t have the means or energy to pursue it further. Maybe hollyhock flower dye really wasn’t as good as indigo. We’ll probably never know.

We humans have helped hollyhocks grow and travel, and give them a multitude of names and uses. But hollyhocks are clearly capable of changing, spreading, and thriving without us.

References:

Wuv’n Acres

Alice M. Coats, Flowers and Their Histories, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1956, 1968

Plant Delights catalogue, spring 2009

Hollyhock seed and plant sources:

JL Hudson

Jung’s Seed

Loghouse Plants

Morrison Home and Garden

Plant Delights Nursery

Select Seeds

Thompson & Morgan

Ricinus communis ‘Carmencita’: the spectacular castor bean pods almost obscure the inconspicuous flowers, just visible below.

Sad news. Gophers and castor oil do mix. At least in some gardens.

Last report, I was experimenting with saturating some cutting-flower bed soils with castor oil solution. This had worked for me before in my tulip beds, where I didn’t water in summer.

I was also keeping tabs on a friend’s garden: she planted castor bean plants around the perimeter of her garden in New Mexico, and had good results keeping gophers away. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be working in her garden here. Gophers are happily working away amongst these castor bean plants. (They are ‘Carmencita’ plants, by the way, for those of you who just want to grow them because they look so cool.)

I had a theory going for awhile: the studies attesting to the efficacy of castor oil sprays on the soil were done by the University of Michigan. And the woman who recommended it in Gardener’s Supply (a catalogue where I’ve found lots of useful and interesting, well, garden supplies) is also from the midwest.

So my theory was this: in the midwest, where it rains all summer (to excess, this summer), the soil is always moist. The midwest also has a lot of naturally fluffy soil (where it hasn’t been eroded away by bad agribusiness practices). That means that there are green things growing in fluffy moist soil all over. So a gopher has a choice between plants in fluffy moist soil without nasty castor oil, or with it. Any sensible gopher would choose without.

In my dry-summer area, though, the only place you see green plants in summer is where people are watering or where there’s a creek. And while there are some deposits of naturally fluffy soil, they are few. Clay, decomposed granite, and composed granite are the lot of most of us. If we want fluffy soil, we have to work at it. So in my area, if a gopher wants nice fluffy easy soil to burrow through, and moisture and plants, it’s most likely going to find them in a garden. And nowhere else.

The thing that throws a wrench in this theory is the New Mexico story. New Mexico has dry summers, too, and as far as I know is not known for fluffy soil. (If I’m wrong about this, let me know.) So why did the castor bean plants work there? Was it just that the gophers hadn’t found that garden yet? (It does take them awhile.) Or something else?

Life is an ever-turning mystery.

Another friend of mine, who has a master’s in agriculture, gave me some things to think about when I relayed this story to her. Was the type of gopher different in the places where the castor oil was effective? That could be crucial. Do all cultivars of castor bean have the same amount of toxins? It is often true that medicinal plants that are bred to have better looks lose some of the medicinal qualities. (Yarrow is just one example of this.)

I took her advice and delved a little deeper: it turns out the University of Michigan study was for moles, not gophers, and Glenn Dudderer is testing it as a chipmunk and squirrel repellent.

But, you will notice, not as a gopher repellent. And even as a mole repellent, castor oil seems to have gotten mixed reviews: Mole Patrol is now the latest in anti-mole materiel. And even the Gardener’s Supply catalogue now concentrates on moles and downplays the gophers when it comes to castor-oil repellents.

Even though it might not be the heavenly gopher cure-all, castor bean plants are really beautiful. Just be aware that, though the oil is edible, and has many medicinal uses, every other part of the plant is highly poisonous. (In fact, I read a gruesome true story of how a woman poisoned her husband by putting the crushed-up beans in his food. Truly a case of an unfortunate U.S. cultural trait: kill first, talk about it later.) Don’t plant them where small children can investigate the pretty seedpods and attractive leaves.

If you have success in keeping gophers out of your garden with castor bean plants or castor oil, let me know. I’m still trying to figure out why they work in some circumstances, and not others.

References:

Gardener’s Supply catalogue

Herbalhut.com, “Natural Animal Repellents”

Michigan State University Extension: Pests