Dune Sunflower - Why Draw

 Dune sunflower, Helianthus debilis, sometimes can be a victim of its own success. It's showy, tough, and flowers enthusiastically year round in frost free areas. A goodly mound of it, with its bright yellow-green leaves, and undiluted yellow ray flowers ringing purple-brown disk florets, brightens up the garden considerably. It wants no pampering. All it asks is space - and there's the rub. 

Space is an increasingly rare commodity in contemporary home sites around here. Lots generally are small, and the houses are built all the way to the 7.5' setback on the sides.( Higher floors sometimes are built all the way out to the property line, curiously reminiscent of medieval street scenes of tall buildings towering over dark, narrow passages). 

The plant is readily available, and some people, municipalities and road authorities have planted it to their chagrin. This is a plant that survives on the pure, sugar sand of Florida's beaches, buffeted by salty coastal winds, and subject to extreme drought while in full sunshine. The average yard, even unfertilized and unirrigated, can be an Eden in comparison, and granted this largesse, the plant takes off.

It doesn't grow as fast as kudzu, but over a period of months a healthy plant will overrun anything in its path, and certainly will outgrow a narrow median strip. Judicious pruning will keep it pretty for a long time. It has to be pruned along the edges, not from the middle, or center. Pruning gets trickier once the  plant has begun to mound over itself. Its long, creeping branches intertwine, so it's pretty impossible to see what belongs to what.

As the plant tumbles over itself, the higher leaves and stems shade out lower levels. A luxuriant-looking mound, may well be completely bare in the middle, with just a veneer of new growth over a scaffolding of aging, woody, leafless stems. It looks atrocious if it is hedged, which is about all most "mow-and go" yard crews know how to do.

Badly "Pruned" Dune Sunflower

This mounding habit makes it particularly attractive in large pots, from which its flowering branches can cascade around it. Eventually the bottom parts of the stem in the pots get woody and bare, which means it's time to cut back hard or pot up another plant. Dune sunflowers transplant easily if they aren't too big. They also root readily and self-sow vigorously if there isn't too much competition. (I wrote more about the dune sunflower in my blog post of Feb. 21, 2021, "January - Not the Greatest New Year.")

All From One Plant, One Pot

 The plant's energetic, uppreaching and semi-vining  habit make it an ideal subject for line drawings. I like drawing better than painting generally. Yellow is a particularly vexing hue for me, because it is so easy to "dirty" it with shading, which destroys its luminance unless you get lucky.

 1-Line Gesture Drawing; Color Study
(Yellow Is Too Light and Greenish)

Part of the definition of line, as it applies to art, is"...an identifiable path created by a point moving in space."("The Elements of Art," J. Paul Getty Museum website: www.getty.edu/for_teachers/building...lessons).

I love this definition because it also seems to denote the action of a growing plant. Attempting to follow that delightful dance of a plant's characteristic energy never fails to engage me.

Dune Sunflower, Pencil Sketch

Drawing is often frustrating and boring, and it requires hours of practice. But succeeding in capturing  movement in the sinuous curve of a stem, or the baroque undulations in a leaf's edge, be it just for an inch, makes all the failed attempts fade into insignificance. I'll never stop trying - and failing -  to get there.

Of course, a line drawing cannot capture the entire being of a plant - in this case, the sandpapery  texture of its leaves, the range of greens and yellows, its volume en masse, even its "non-fragrant" odor. That is a problem of all 2-dimensional media - it can't accomplish everything in one go. But artists and writers of all abilities attempt to capture and communicate something of the innate "truth" of an object or landscape. 

Texture- Dune Sunflower

I looked for answers on "why we draw" on the web, and all I came up with was articles on chemistry -  substances produced by the brain that make us feel pleasure and/or reward. But nothing on why one person is compelled to take pencil to paper while another is driven to put in hours learning to dance, make something, design a building, or throw a ball through a net. Apparently the chemicals are the same, and when you get down to it, they really don't tell us much. And why do some of us want to communicate so badly? It's more than what my husband calls, "teaching your grandmother to suck eggs." It's more like a toddler desperately wanting others to appreciate the wonderfulness of his latest toy. Drawing plants, for me, has something to do with joy, with sharing, with gratitude. But basically, I really can't say.

Once You Have Goldenrod . . .

 "Once you have goldenrod, you will always have goldenrod," was the cryptic remark of a stalwart in the Naples chapter of the  Florida Native Plant Society when I took home a specimen she had potted. I asked what she meant, and she just gave me a wry smile, and said, "You'll see."

It didn't take too long. Look up "goldenrod" on a search engine and you'll find topics like, " How do I control goldenrod in my garden," and "How do I get rid of goldenrod in my garden."

Besides being tough as nails, the species I got from Freda spreads vigorously by rhizomes. Pot it up, and it creeps out through every drainage hole. Pull it out, and it shows up across the path, or in a neighboring bed after a few weeks. It produces thousands of seeds, but they don't seem to be all that viable, because the plant doesn't jump all the way across the yard, but stays mainly in the general area where I first planted it. Maybe the seeds are mostly for the little creatures that must eat them.  

"Our" goldenrod grows outside the easterly wall, which is remarkably deficient in windows, so I don't have a good idea of what goes on with it. Still, I get the idea that the butterflies and skippers that visit us generally find other flowers in the yard more attractive. On the other hand, I rarely pass by it without seeing some manner of wasp or bee vigorously stuffing itself or collecting pollen. Often there may be several species feeding at the same time.

Paper Wasp on Goldenrod

The plant in our yard seems to fit the description of Solidago fistulosa, "Pinebarren Goldenrod," better than any others, but I'm making no guarantees. There are over 100 species of goldenrod worldwide, and they hybridize readily. On the other hand, according to the 1998 edition of Wunderlin's Guide to the Vascular Plants of Florida, only about 5 species occur naturally in southern Florida, and it doesn't really look like any of the other possibilities.

Goldenrod, Pen & Ink

It doesn't form a classic basal rosette like many members of the Aster Family, including some goldenrods, but just pops straight out of the ground, and reaches for the sky, unburdened by any side branches. Narrow, lance-shaped leaves, sometimes with toothed margins, alternate around a bristly stem. The leaves are attached directly to the stem, with no petioles. As the stem elongates, the lower leaves wither and may or may not fall off.

The inflorescence is somewhat pyramidal, and made up of graceful, arching wands, alternating around the stems, and bearing numerous saturated yellow heads. The heads have both disc and ray florets, but the latter are a little sparse. The stem usually forms just one inflorescence, at its end, but if you cut off a faded inflorescence, the remaining stem sometimes will produce more blooming wands on its sides. It won't make a new, blooming "pyramid." 

Goldenrod Sketch

The stems can get up to 6 feet tall (though mine don't get that high), and the leaves die from the bottom up, so eventually you have a cluster of dead heads and seeds atop a bare stalk irregularly flagged with withered leaves. That's definitely when it needs to be cut back hard, but being a negligent sort of gardener, I rarely do that in a timely manner. This trait could be masked a bit if the goldenrod were placed behind lower-growing plants. Some of ours have spread into a clump of lavender lantana, but it stays too low to hide the stems completely when they get unsightly. 

It's often windy here, and I should stake them. If our yard were bigger, and the  garden beds wider I could let the goldenrods droop,  but as it is, they flop over and obstruct the path, and become something of a nuisance. It's a magnificent plant, and I wish I had space for a grand swathe of it, bending and bowing in the breeze, instead of my constrained, small patch. But I wouldn't do without it. For one thing, it reminds me of the wisdom,humor, and lop-sided smile of a long-dead friend. 

Megachile Bee on Goldenrod

 

The Non-Doing Pear

My mother made the best pear preserves I've ever tasted. They were so rich and syrupy smooth you'd swear they had butter in them. As my University of Florida botany professor used to say (He was a mushroom specialist, and was talking about the culinary delights of some Florida fungi), "you'd think you'd died and gone to heaven" after eating them.

They were wonderful on a hot biscuit, but sometimes we just ate them out of the jar. And while they were deliciously sweet, they had just enough balance, without being tart, so you didn't feel like you needed to run for the toothbrush after indulging.

The fruits were hard and gritty, and she cooked them just soft enough, but never mushy. Part of the appeal of my mother's preserves was their wonderful brown color. The preserves were a maple-syrup, honey-brown, not the anemic white things I see on internet recipes. But all it was was sugar, water, pears and spices, cooked just right. I never had pears, and foolishly, never asked for her recipe.

I don't think the pears she used were much good for eating out of hand. Maybe she deliberately picked them early, or it wasn't the best variety for my parents' north Florida home, or just a manifestation of the tree's generally unsatisfactory nature. (More on that later).

I've often wondered if they were the same kind of pears that grew on my grandmother's farm in South Carolina. When I was little, taking the cows to and from the barn and pasture was a special treat. My Aunt Iola had us children "leading" Red, who not only was the dominant cow and knew perfectly well how to get where she was going, but also very affable and docile. My aunt really had to watch Jersey, a mean cow who would jump the fence into the cornfield at any opportunity.

Back to the pears. One of the delays in the daily journeys was caused by old pear trees. Their hard, inedible fruits littered the ground, and the cows scarfed down as many as they could before my aunt got impatient and hurried them along. They probably made good preserves if you got to them before the cows, but I was too young to wonder. Now that I'd like to ask there's nobody left to answer.

I am not sure if the pear tree my parents planted in north Florida every truly flourished. My parents said that they stood under it one winter debating whether to cut it down because it never "did" anything. Being unhurried folk, and not unkind, they granted it one more year, whereupon it bloomed and fruited gloriously, like it never had done before, and the whole family rejoiced over the resulting bounty of pear preserves.

Thereafter they made a ritual of standing under said tree every winter, threatening it gently or not so gently, with the prospect of ending it all. And from then on, as the story goes, the tree was a faithful producer in spite of its sorry appearance.

My mother has been dead for 4 years now, and my father even longer, but the pear tree remains - just barely. It's not so much clinging to life as gradually letting go. We survivors go back as often as we can, but there's nobody to give it a good scare, and worse, nobody to use whatever harvest there might be. So the non-doing pear tree persists -  a weathered sentinel from the golden-brown sweetness of a past time.
.....................................

I clipped this branchlet on a visit, but colored it after I returned to south Florida. I don't know whether the hard brown spheres were immature fruits or shriveled remnants. The leaves were bright green when I picked it, but turned their "fall" colors after a few days. Even though the sketch wouldn't be quite biologically accurate, I couldn't resist trying to capture these vibrant hues.

Clean Sweep

I've never managed to keep a  neat garden, and neighbors and walkers tell me they like my flowers. Still, I worry that the subtext is, "Your yard is an unholy mess, but at least it's colorful." Finally, old age, an arm injury still lingering after cleaning up after Irma in 2017, and my general sleaze coalesced into the proverbial "perfect storm" landscape-wise, and I had to hire somebody to clear-cut the mess.

Chaos is the Opposite of a Garden

Phyla nodiflora, "Fogfruit," makes a wonderful flowering natvie ground cover that attracts many pollinators, the lovely white peacock butterfly included. It was invading the driveway, and  had crept, kudzu-like, over a stack of paving blocks, 6 bags of mulch, and a patch of wickedly spiny agave, itself out of control even though I had been attacking it regularly.

Phyla nodiflora - Good Pollinator Plant

Sea purslane, Sesuvium portulacastrum, another desirable native ground cover,  was smothering a pot of lotus and a nice patch of Heliotropium amplexicaule. It also presented a bad tripping hazard for anybody brave enough to make a foray into the "jungle." Thickets of scorpion-tail, scattered scarlet sage, and blue porterweed competed for light. Swaths of gaillardias and mounds of dune sunflower were flopping over onto the neighbor's driveway. The gravel swale, where I had nourished the fond idea of creating a meadow of blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium angustifolium), was instead a mess of moisture-loving opportunists. A dead palm tree and deformed Red Geiger, both courtesy of Hurricane Irma, completed the picture of utter surrender.

Even the rosiest of glasses couldn't mask the reality. Desperate times called for desperate measures, and I called a garden center to restore the bare bones of  the landscape. Two truckloads of debris and over a hundred bags of mulch later, we have one of the neatest and most cared-for yard on the street, which has its pluses, but is not exactly my ideal garden.

New Look for the Front Yard

Although the yard hardly is bare, the new space comes with a cost beyond what the garden center charged. For years our yard has been one of the very few landscapes in our neighborhood to offer  significant amenities of pesticide-free shelter, food and water for animals. Now in its rather barren state those amenities, especially the shelter, are much-reduced.

 However, we do not want to return to what it had become, which was by no means a garden. One thing I have learned is that the garden is as much about space as it is about plants. Without space,  there is no focal point, no rest for the eye or the soul. If the garden is neither  pleasant for walking or viewing, it is a failure, regardless of the beauty of individual plants. The very word "garden" signals the imposition of some kind of order. A  "wild garden" is a contradiction in terms.

So now, I have to recreate some of the lost habitat without losing the harmony of the space. As the old plants begin to resurface through the mulch, I have to organize them into well-defined beds, augmented perhaps with potted specimens. The self-discipline to pull out the surplus will be hard for me to maintain, but if I don't, the mess will re-establish itself quickly. That should provide motivation enough, because the yard really had become horrible and impassable.

Pots for Color

Given the fact that the yard is so small, I also need to ensure that the majority of the plants do more than one job. The agaves don't exactly fit that requirement, though dragonflies like to perch on their upright leaves, and pollinators love the flowers when they appear finally. But we both love the sculptural quality of the plants. A Red Geiger volunteer seedling will fill the space left by the agaves, and all will have enough room for the next several years. Though not a native, the Geiger will be a multi-purpose asset, and deserves its own post.

Wish me luck!

Little Daisy - Big Problem

A year or so ago I noticed a sprawling, low-growing aster relative cropping up here and there in the yard. I found it completely undistinguished and entirely without ornamental value, but I didn't make more than a half-hearted effort to get rid of it.

Like so many uninvited visitors, it has proven itself a very unwelcome guest in no hurry to leave. It has been beastly hot much of this summer, and I haven't been working in the yard as much as usual. I walked outside a few weeks back and discovered that this seemingly unassuming plant was in the process of overrunning the yard.

A quick ID session revealed it to be Tridax procumbens, or "coat buttons," a noxious weed if ever there were one. Originating in Central America, it has spread worldwide, and infests just about any location with a mild climate. It appears that the only places the weed has established itself in the United States are Florida, Puerto Rico ( I know it's a territory, not a state) and Hawaii, though there have been sporadic outbreaks in other states. However, if it is in north Florida and the Florida panhandle, it must be creeping into southern Georgia and Alabama by now.

Tridax procumbens, habit, ray floret, head

Tridax procumbens has opposite leaves which are arrow-shaped and deeply toothed. The margins (leaf edges) are fringed with tiny hairs. The top surface is felty dark green, with deeply impressed veins. If you bend a leaf to catch the light you will see glittering ranks of  short, stiff hairs that create a texture like fine-grit sandpaper.

The undersides of the leaves are a paler, grayish green with a less scabrous texture. The raised veins are very pronounced, and sport hairs of varying lengths.

The entire plant - leaves, petioles, stems, bases of the flower heads - is hairy. The stems are pale green shading into magenta-brown. The entire head is no bigger than a dime. It has numerous yellow disc flowers and a rather sparing ring of off-white or cream-colored ray florets ending in 3 teeth. (Hence the name "Tridax"). The heads produce thousands of achenes (seeds) whose chaff lets them float away on any breeze.

Leaves, Stems, Heads, Bristles

Triadax procumbens is on the Federal Noxious Weed List as well as the Noxious Weed List of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. It is also on Florida's Prohibited Aquatic and Wetland Plants List. My yard is dry and sandy, but the plant evidently thrives even more given moist conditions.

It's not altogether easy to weed, especially when it is intertwined with groundcovers. It's hard sometimes to find the central point from which the stems radiate outward, especially since the stems are brittle and break easily. You've got to get the taproot, though, or the thing will just regenerate.

In Florida it is illegal to possess, transport or sell "coat buttons." I don't know whether having an infestation on your property qualifies as "possession," but I wanted to be rid of it in any case. I bagged it and disposed of it in the garbage, not the yard waste. Better buried in the landfill than further distributed in county mulch. Though I've won the first round, I am sure I am not through with the war. There must be an established seed bank in the yard by now, and the source of the original contamination likely is still churning out the achenes.

Noxious or not, the plant has medicinal and pest-fighting qualities. It is used in indigenous medicine for a variety of ailments, including wound treatment, stopping bleeding, diarrhea, backache, bronchial congestion, and worms. Dried pulerized leaves and essential oils extracted from the leaves appear to provide some control against insects, nematodes and fungi. Though not native to India, it is used in Ayurvedic medicine. It also has cancer-fighting potential.