Beauty And The Zits

Shooting skyward, over six feet tall, the handsome stranger peeked over the stockade fence.  This mystery was accompanied by some commoners, including daisy fleabane, Queen Anne’s lace, and pink cosmos, all living in the giant’s shadows in a narrow strip along the gravel.  Featuring short, dense, bottlebrush leaves on a few lanky stems, it was topped by brilliant scarlet, trumpet-shaped flowers.  Not a well-known wildflower, and not a nasty invasive, a little Wednesday morning detective work pinned this suspect as Ipomopsis rubra, a.k.a. Texas plume, standing cypress, or scarlet gilia.  A truly beautiful thing, it can tolerate hot, dry soil, and exists as a biennial or short-term perennial.  Hummingbirds, legendary for their attraction to flowers in shades of red, not surprisingly serve as pollinators of this species.  Probably not a garden stalwart to count on for a floral display, but lovely when it appears, a gift from the gardening gods who all too often send us crazy snake worms, tomato blights, and, as I’ll later describe, plant zits.

But where is it native?  This is a question recently asked and answered by a team of botanical researchers from the Universities of North and South Carolina.  They note that I. rubra was a well-known garden plant at the time of the Civil War.  Bartram, traveling through Georgia and Florida, described it growing wild in 1791, and even earlier, Johann Dillenius was studying the seeds and growing it at Oxford University in England in 1732.  Yet it remained unclear where exactly the species originated and where it later traveled, aided by humans.  By studying every available herbarium record, the scientists have concluded that standing cypress is native in small pockets, from low country North Carolina to Texas and Oklahoma, and lives in a wide variety of habitats, from prairie to seashore, from granitic soils to limestone.  Occurrences north of Arkansas and ranging all the way into Ontario are likely introduced, including the plant growing right here in Troy.

Much less desirable and even more obscure, the Rudbeckia psyllid is making its presence known in a local garden.  We first learned of this strange insect in 2016, when a Master Gardener found it in her brother’s garden in Massachusetts, feeding on the ever-popular botanical megastar Goldsturm Rudbeckia.  Apparently not an entomologist, the brother described the damage as “zits,” but a more prosaic description could be purplish-black spots with greenish raised bumps. 

Although the details of their biology remain obscure, these creatures have several names, including psyllids, triozids, and “jumping plant lice.”  When in the mature nymphal state, they are about one-eighth inch long, flattened and very colorful with a light green abdomen, red-orange head and thorax, and white wing pads. They feed by inserting their needle-like mouthparts into lower surfaces of the leaf and sucking out plant juices. This feeding causes a distinct, shallow depression and purplish spots.  We aren’t sure how much trouble these triozids might cause in the future, but acne is no acme of anyone’s summer.