Botanicus

Goldenrod

Behold the flaming yellow glory of this native flowering plant

A native plant I love to see this time of year is Solidago, from the Latin solidare — “to make whole” — which suggests the medicinal powers sometimes attributed to the genus.

Commonly called “goldenrod,” it’s a perennial that bursts into magnificent yellow fireworks across the mountains, piedmont, sandhills and coastal plains of our Old North State. At least a dozen varieties are found regionally in the wild, according to the North Carolina Native Plant Society.

I’m not alone in my admiration for a goldenrod. My neighbor, Steve Windham, native plant specialist, tells me why he enjoys hiking the Appalachian Trail as summer turns toward fall.

“If you’ve ever walked out into a mountain meadow under a blue autumn sky with goldenrod in bloom,” Windham says, “you’ll know how truly spectacular it is.”

I remember just such a sight on the farm where I grew up, a fallow field resplendent with goldenrod, joe-pye weed, milkweed and ironweed. On that brilliant palette danced flights of butterflies — monarch, red admiral and tiger swallowtail — plus a host of skippers, cobalts and other beetles, bumblebees and metallic green flies. It was a sight wonderful to behold.

So why not replicate it in your home landscape?

Enterprising growers and nurseries have expanded the number of goldenrod varieties available for your yard or garden to more than 200.

“I use goldenrod in my garden and in my landscape designs because it’s so tough, so easy to grow and attracts so many pollinators,” Windham says. He tells me that, in his own backyard, he has a perennial border featuring a goldenrod cultivar called “Skyrocket,” which stands about three feet tall. Lower-growing dwarf cultivars can also be planted.

Windham, who helped install the ornamental grasses and pollinator meadow at the Greensboro Arboretum, recommends adding to your goldenrod native grasses such as little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) or big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii), Joe-pye weed (Eupatorium fistulosum), ironweed (Vernonia glauca), phlox (Phlox carolina), asters (Aster paten) and bluestar (Amsonia tabernaemontana). Even after the flowers’ colors have faded, you’ll have a garden or border featuring interesting foliage that lasts into the winter months.

Those of you who suffer from fall allergies may think that Steve and I have lost our minds when we recommend goldenrod for your home garden.

Well, the goldenrod is not likely responsible for your runny nose and itchy eyeballs.

The culprit is another N.C. native perennial in the genus Ambrosia, from the Latin “food of the gods.”

Maybe the botanist responsible for giving this plant a name had a wicked sense of humor, but poor Ambrosia artemisiifolia is commonly called “ragweed.” It also bursts into bloom across the mountains, piedmont, sandhills and coastal plain of our Old North State in about the same habitats and at the same time of year as goldenrod.

Ragweed produces green, unremarkable blooms that release vast numbers of small, lightweight granules of airborne pollen that can be spread for miles by the wind. By contrast, goldenrod draws pollinators to its brilliant yellow flowers with nectar, relying on the pollinators to spread the relatively heavy pollen granules that glom onto their bodies and legs.

So plant beautiful Solidago. And forgive pesky Ambrosia.

If you were a plant and somebody called you “ragweed,” you’d probably have a vengeful attitude, too.  OH

Ross Howell Jr. is a freelance writer in Greensboro.

Their Darkest Hours

For brilliant red poinsettias, keep them under wraps

By Ross Howell Jr.

For years as a grad student and later as an itinerant bachelor, I put off buying Christmas decorations because I didn’t want to move them from one apartment to the next. Holiday decorating for me meant buying poinsettias — usually in foil-wrapped containers — to get instant seasonal cheer with minimal effort.

Besides, poinsettias have a cool history.

Indigenous to Mexico, Euphorbia pulcherrima owes its popular name to Joel Poinsett. Born in 1779 to a wealthy family in Charleston, South Carolina, Poinsett was a world traveler. President John Quincy Adams appointed him as the first Minister to Mexico in 1825. While visiting south of Mexico City, Poinsett saw a plant known among locals as Flor de Nochebuena, or “Christmas Eve flower.” An amateur botanist, Poinsett sent samples back home. Propagated and sold, the plants by 1836 had become known in the States as “poinsettias.”

So what did I do with my once-lovely poinsettias after the holidays were over? I dumped the then-desiccated plants into the trash.

As time passed, my lazy approach to holiday decorating left me feeling guiltier and guiltier.

All those plants I’d tossed. What if I’d tried to winter them over, do whatever mysterious things needed to be done to have them erupt in scarlet again the following Christmas?

Then one evening a message popped up on my neighborhood listserv.

“Is anyone in the area trying to force poinsettias? We are trying to do it but have to travel during the ‘dark time’ and need someone to tend them for us.” The sender was Tom Krissak.

Surely Krissak could give me a shortcut to poinsettia success. I mean, he already knew there was something called “dark time.”

Turns out, Krissak — retired from the funeral business — had sent the message on behalf of his partner, Samuel Johnson, who’s the gardener in their household. Krissak gave me Johnson’s number.

“Oh, I really just took up plants after I retired a couple years ago,” Johnson confesses over the phone.

He tells me he grew up in northern Virginia but has lived all over the world. A mathematician, Johnson first came to Greensboro to teach at Guilford College.

After years at Guilford, he left Greensboro for a time and studied the law, became a practicing attorney and returned to Greensboro for a second time.

“I like trying to keep plants alive,” Johnson says, “but I have just the opposite of a green thumb. If you want to talk about poinsettias, you need to call Esther Maltby.”

Maltby is a neighbor who recently stepped down after seven years as director of the Dunleith Community Garden on Chestnut Street.

“Esther and I worked out a deal,” Johnson continues. “She’s caring for the poinsettias while we’re away. If they live, we’ll split the plants between us.”

So what’s Maltby’s take on the poinsettia project?

“It’s really Samuel who’s done all the research,” Maltby says. “I just agreed to babysit.”

Maltby tells me she grew up in Pakistan, the daughter of Protestant missionaries. Her father was an engineer; her mother a teacher. Poinsettias were prolific where they lived in Pakistan, growing into bushes 8 to 12 feet tall.

“I never gave a thought to cultivating little ones,” Maltby says with a laugh.

Her strategy for forcing the poinsettias to bloom is to keep them in light—but not direct sunlight — for eight hours a day. Then she plunges them into darkness — under cardboard boxes covered by blankets — for the remaining 16 hours of the day.

When Maltby sees red bracts sprouting, she’ll stop the “dark time.” She began the process in mid-October, a little concerned about having enough time to bring the plants to full Christmas glory.

“Samuel messages me every day, asking how the poinsettias are doing,” she says. “I tell him they look good; they’re putting out lots of green leaves.”

She pauses.

“I sure hope this works,” she says.

Me, too.

Regardless, I realize now keeping poinsettias holiday-to-holiday requires way more mindfulness than a lazy guy like me can muster.  PS

Ross Howell Jr. is getting ready for Elon University’s January term, when he’ll be teaching a general studies course entitled “A Brief History of Truth.”

What’s in a Name?

That which we call a daffodil by any other name still ushers in spring

By Ross Howell Jr.

Despite the cold, when March came to the mountains the boy I once was felt there might again be spring. After a snowy season feeding cattle with their rumps — and mine — bowed against bitter winds, I walked along split-rail fences, melting drifts limning muddy pastures.

The earth was warming with spring, and on sunny afternoons groundhogs nosed from their dens, groggy with winter sleep. I hunted them with my uncle’s pump-action .22.

One afternoon I came upon a sight that filled me with wonder. A neat row of daffodils nodded in the sun at the edge of a wood. Their yellow blossoms were all that remained of what had once been a homestead. I watched them as they danced with the breeze. Their faces were hopeful. I imagined a mother planting them for her family, a thin border next to a log house, long since vanished.

Back then, I didn’t call them “daffodils.” Among my kin, they were known as “jonquils.” In fact, I don’t remember hearing the word daffodil until my senior year of high school, in Mrs. Humphries’s English class, when we read the William Wordsworth poem, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.”

I raised my hand, wanting desperately to impress
Mrs. Humphries. She was a recent Radford College graduate, and quite attractive.

“Yes, Ross?”

“Those flowers sound like jonquils to me,” I said.

“In England, they’re more commonly referred to as daffodils. From the Latin asphodilus, The English ‘daffodil’ is probably adapted from the Dutch, ‘da asphodel,’”
Mrs. Humphries said.

I was crestfallen.

“Why everybody knows that,” my nemesis,
Verna Belcher, hissed from the desk behind me.

A quick poll of my Greensboro neighbors — my “scientific” question was, “When you were growing up, what did you call the yellow flower that bloomed first in spring?”— yielded mostly “jonquil,” though “daffodil” was an occasional response, and even “buttercup.”

It’s complicated.

“In some parts of the country any yellow daffodil is called a jonquil, usually incorrectly,” writes the American Daffodil Society, employing what I expect is their euphemism for the rural South. “As a rule, but not always, jonquil species and hybrids are characterized by several yellow flowers, a strong scent and rounded foliage.”

Now that plant sounds like what I think of as narcissus. So when I say “jonquil,” I should be saying “narcissus”? It’s not that easy.

“The term narcissus (Narcissus sp.) refers to a genus of bulbs that includes hundreds of species and literally tens of thousands of cultivars!” writes gardener Julie Day. “The Narcissus genus includes daffodils, jonquils and paperwhites, among many others, so when in doubt, this is the term to use.”

Just to confuse me further, Day adds this statement: “However, when someone says ‘narcissus,’ they’re usually referring to the miniature white holiday blooms of Narcissus tazetta papyraceous, known as paperwhites.”

Now I have paperwhites in my garden, too. But I call them “paperwhites.” So am I to understand that the flowers I called “jonquils” as a boy I should’ve called “daffodils,” and some of the bloomers I have in my garden now, the ones with the small trumpets, rounded leaves and scent, the ones I’d thought were narcissus, are in fact jonquils?

Not necessarily. Julie Day goes on to say that “daffodil” is “the official common name” for any plant in the genus Narcissus.

“So, if the plant is considered a Narcissus, it is also considered a daffodil,” Day writes. “However, most people use the term ‘daffodil’ when referring to the large, trumpet-shaped flowers of the Narcissus pseudonarcissus. These are those big, showy, familiar bulbs that bloom in spring that we all know and love.”

Got that?

But what about Mrs. Humphries? And the asphodels? Turns out they’re a different genus altogether. But some of their blossoms sure look a lot like jonquils. I mean, narcissus. Oh, you know what I mean.

And what about buttercups?

Things sure were simpler when I was a boy in the mountains hunting groundhogs.  PS

Ross Howell Jr. was rewarded for dividing and replanting bulbs this fall with a display of daffodils that brightened even the most confused and gloomy of March days.