Fit For The King

Poking along Ridge Road by bicycle, I stumbled upon a handsome example of a powerful plant.  Proudly in flower, and growing boldly out of a living maple tree trunk, it’s an herb of presidential politics and festive celebrations.  Used with skill it might cure, but cooked wrong it can easily kill.  ‘Twas once renowned enough to make the sensational swiveling singer from Memphis croon.  It’s a plant with a resume so slick it could turn a Harvard grad green.  I give you pokeweed.

Growing from Maine to Minnesota and southward, Phytolacca americana is an herbaceous perennial that pops up in pastures, cleared areas, fencerows and open spots in the woods.  Covered in simple green leaves, its purplish, branched stems can reach an impressive eight feet tall and bear elongated racemes of white flowers which become attractive purple berries.  This botanical exuberance is fueled by a deep and extensive root system.  While visually impressive, consider this:  the entire plant is poisonous, and swallowing enough may cause vomiting, spasms, convulsions, then death from respiratory failure. 

Despite this gruesome little fact, pokeweed has long been considered a culinary delight, especially below the Mason-Dixon.  The trick is to harvest only young leaves, before they exhibit any reddish pigment, and boil them thrice, discarding the water each time.  This regimen gives us the basic ingredient in poke sallet, which reportedly has a flavor between asparagus and spinach.  While it sounds simple, my advice is, “don’t try this at home.” 

A much safer option would be to bring your appetite to one of the four annual pokeweed festivals.  The doings in Harlan, Kentucky feature a poke sallet feast with side dishes of boiled eggs, green onions, cornbread and buttermilk.  A cooking contest gives $25 prizes for the best poke recipe, appetizer, and dessert.  Whether one has to be an expert in poke preparation to enter is unclear, but I imagine the judges pay up on their life insurance before the tasting.  And the one tune sure to be blaring from the loudspeakers is “Poke Salad Annie,” popularized in the ‘70’s by none other than Elvis Presley.

What might drive people to eat the horticultural equivalent of a hand grenade?  One historic reason would be plain hunger, especially problematic in spring, the “safe” period for poke.  Eventually, poke sallet became a supermarket staple, sold by the Allen Canning Company of Siloam Springs, Arkansas.  Medicinally, topical applications of pokeweed were used to treat itching, inflammation and acne, while careful ingestion might aid arthritis, mumps, or constipation.  Recently, investigations have probed the use of poke extracts in curing cancer and HIV-AIDS.

But wait!  There’s more.  As a child, a friend and I collected a large jar of poke berries and spending an afternoon squeezing a wonderful juice that permanently stained our shirts.  We didn’t know this same stuff was dye to Native Americans and ink for Civil War soldiers.  Supporters of Polk’s candidacy wore a sprig of poke, a potent plant for the least known consequential president.       

Full of Surprises

If I wrote that every garden needed some Lycoris squamigera, I probably wouldn’t tickle the fancy of too many people.  If I said you would die for some Resurrection Lilies, some interest would arise, especially among the church folk.  A pop-up advert for Surprise Lilies would stir up the optimists, who think everything is coming up roses, but might turn off the pessimists, who can just picture a new invasive.  But if I showed you some Naked Ladies, everyone would clamor, and guys might even get interested in horticulture.

All these wonderful names belong to just one plant which has a rather odd life pattern.  In spring, along with the awakening of most other plants, a cluster of thick, dark green, strap-shaped leaves is produced.  Shortly thereafter, however, these die, and the space is taken over by daylilies, lady’s mantle, and other garden plants, or even weeds.  Weeks go by, then in early to mid-August comes the magic.  Two-foot tall flower stalks emerge from the ground, crowned by clusters of magenta buds.  These open into pink, trumpet-shaped, lily-like flowers enclosing a cluster of yellow stamens.  For those who have forgotten the early set of leaves, it seems terribly odd and more than a little surprising that these leafless flowers have sprung from seemingly nowhere.  If you remember the leaves, but thought the plant died and vanished, then it’s resurrection is a joyful occasion.  And the curvy, fun, pink flowers certainly do hold more than a little of the feminine mystique.

Just where Naked Ladies comes from is a bit of a mystery, too.  Signs point to Japan or China, and it might be a hybrid of two different Lycoris species. Dr. George Rogers Hall of Rhode Island is credited with introducing it to New England from Japan in 1862.  Hall was a medical man seeking his fortune by opening a small hospital in Shanghai, but he entered history by being the first to import plants from Japan to the USA.  Having proven hardy in the chilly climate, Naked Ladies spread through various distribution channels across the country.  Given its disappearing act, it is difficult to offer in garden centers, where the task to sell a pot of non-descript leaves or fragile, fast-fading flowers is mighty.  Designated more of a “garden novelty item,” Naked Ladies has found a home within mail-order catalogs and web sources, where it can be easily acquired.  It is also undoubtedly a pass-along plant, since it can easily be dug up after the leaves fade, divided, and then shared with friends and neighbors. 

I can certainly attest to the hardiness of Naked Ladies, having several clumps in my old garden planted many decades ago by the previous gardener.  One patch pops up next to an ancient forsythia, a large group lives in my perennial garden, and one poor soul struggles to survive under an expanding magnolia.  Naked Ladies need their sun and don’t like competition, and who can blame them?

Those Darn Yellow Daisies

Talk to botanists and they’ll tell you that the world is full of DYCs.  Botanists don’t care about DC (a thorny place full of prickly issues), the DMZ (a borderline patch between North and South Korea that is no place to garden) or AC/DC (loud rock music is not good for plants).  But DYCs are both a source of amusement and puzzlement, because in botany, they are the damn yellow composites.

Composites are plants with two part, daisy-like flowers.  Each bloom consists of a center disk flower, which may be green, brown, yellow, black, or any other shade, and the “petals,” or ray flowers around the disk.  So far, so good, so why the swearing?  Because there are so many species of yellow composites and they all look so much alike.  A botanist’s street cred (even if she works in the woods) hangs on being able to properly ID a plant, and DYCs create mayhem and foolishness.      

Of the dozens of wild DYCs, a relative handful have found their way into cultivated landscapes.  Three of them are in bloom at our Demonstration Garden right now.  Oxeye sunflower (Heliopsis heilanthoides) reaches a height of three to four feet, has dark green, opposite, toothed leaves, and covers itself in yellow daisies with a yellow center.  Its minor faults – that red aphids find hanging out on the stems beneath the flowers an irresistible place to be, and that it self-seeds a little bit – should be overlooked in favor of its jaunty demeanor.  Ashy sunflower (Helianthus mollis) is less well known but deserves consideration.  It has blue-green, opposite leaves without teeth and similar yellow flowers.  Cup plant (Silphium perfoliatum) has higher aspirations, producing its DYC flowers six feet or more above the earth.  Its paired leaves encircle the stem, hence the common name.  Michigan lists it as an endangered native plant, while Connecticut calls it invasive, so go figure.  All three of these species, like most DYCs, will live happily for years in full sun to slight shade in a wide range of adequately drained soils.

If cup plant excites you for its stature, you’ll also love the towering cutleaf coneflower (Rudbeckia nitida ‘Herbstonne’), which reaches over seven feet.  Its ray flowers of an even more luminescent shade than most DYCs droop a bit and the disk is mounded and slightly green.  Double-flowered variants of this also exist, but the blossoms look like used Kleenex to me.    Most bizarre is Cabbage  leaf coneflower (Rudbeckia maxima), which shoots up seven foot leggy stalks, each topped with a single bloom of very limp rays encircling a big brown disk.  The base is a set of strappy, blue-green leaves which reminded someone of the main ingredient in cole slaw. 

Lest we forget the plant that swept the ‘1980’s, consider Rudbeckia fulgida ‘Goldsturm.’  With black-eyed Susan cheerfulness and Terminator toughness, it became the poster child for the “new American garden” school of landscape design, made millions for the nursery industry and thrives coast to coast.  Damn good for a yellow composite.    

Fuzzy, But Not Cute

Appearances can indeed be deceiving.  When I saw the white fuzzy stuff on the flower stalks of the hostas, I thought “must be a woolly aphid” and kept going.  Then it appeared on the Joe-Pye, the wild senna, and the dwarf lilac.  After receiving a phone call about this mystery critter, I took a better look.  These woolly aphids could jump!  Some searching revealed the proper identification:  citrus plant hoppers, a.k.a. mealy lantern flies or frosted lightning hoppers.  Gadzooks, what next?

Since I like the name “frosted lightning hopper” best, I’ll call these creatures FLH’s for short.  Scientifically, they are Metcalfa pruinosa.  The genus name honors entomologist Zeno “Zippy” Metcalf, a North Carolina State University researcher who was dedicated to the study of leafhoppers and their kin, while “pruinosa” means frosty, referring to the insect’s aforementioned fuzz.  They feed by sucking the sap from plants, and while a few FLH’s may not cause much damage, a higher population may induce stem twisting, stunting or dieback.  The fluff may also be off-putting to folks who like their plants neat, and might be troublesome to nurseries selling plants.  Perhaps most problematic is the waste stream of sugary liquid called honeydew which FLH’s emit.  This backdoor by-product lands on plant foliage and then grows a crop of an ugly black fungus called sooty mold.  If the FLH’s are high in a tree, the honeydew and resulting mold can land on patio furniture, parked cars or slow-moving pets, creating more clean-up work for the gardener and adding to the “honey do” list.

Just like I found in my own garden, the FLH feeds upon a wide variety of plants, including azaleas, magnolias, viburnums, and citrus trees.  A native to North America, it ranges over a large area, from Quebec to Florida, and west to California.  While we often complain of foreign insects invading our shores, we don’t often consider that our bad bugs go wandering, too.  This is in fact the case with the FLH, which is now found in parts of Europe, and has been causing problems in agriculture in South Korea.  May they’ll try a tariff.    

Life for FLHs starts out as eggs hidden in woody plant tissue or under tree bark.  Young nymphs hatch in mid-May.  These are covered in white waxy filaments, probably as a protective aid.  If you’re fortunate enough to be familiar with mealybugs or cottony cushion scales, these will seem superficially similar.  The adults, sporting a completely different look, are smooth, gray to brown, and wedge-shaped, with prominent yellow eyes.  I can reliably report that their vision is very good.  Each time I approached the infested hosta stalks with my secateurs to snip a sample, they moved slyly around the stem to hide.  But even more remarkable is their jumping ability.  Once I got my sample into the office, opening the bag allowed the FLH’s to jump several feet, onto the shoulders of the Master Gardeners, which caused a mixture of consternation bordering on fright.  They ain’t called “hoppers” for nothing.