Sneezemaker and the Basswood Bees

Each September finds me, along with some other adventurous souls, ambling in honor of the Hudson River Valley Ramble.  This series of events, all held in proximity to our great waterway, aims to get people out and doing.  I enjoy leading my plant walk on Papscanee Island, where we visit the tree that grew in Brooklyn (Ailanthus altissima) as well as the plant that killed Abraham Lincoln’s mother (white snakeroot).  We pause at old favorites, like the three hostas growing under the touch-me-nots, and always find something new, too.

Our novelty this year turned out to be a lovely plant I once tried, and failed, to grow in my garden.  We discovered just one small patch of Helenium autumnale, sometimes called Helen’s Flower, growing inches from the mighty Hudson. The location wasn’t surprising; it requires a moist soil, making it a denizen of streambanks, ditches, pondsides and the like, in all lower-48 states.  My garden, it turns out, is just too dry.  The bright yellow flowers, composed of a prominent disk surrounded by fringed rays, make it a thing of beauty.  The plant hybridizers, seizing something good, turned Helenium into a garden center commodity by expanding its floral color range into all shades of red and orange.  Don’t focus on its other common name, however, since no one wants to grow sneezeweed.  This moniker derives from the old-time practice of using the dried blossoms and leaves as snuff.  Nowadays, it’s more likely that nursery customers might assume sneezeweed causes allergies, and drop it like a pot of poison ivy, so smart marketers focus on the connection to beautiful Helen of Troy.  Supposedly, Helen’s falling tears caused this plant to spring forth.  That would be quite a feat, since she lived in Greece and Helenium is strictly American, but let’s not question the gods too closely.

A tour highlight is finding the lone basswood tree, known also as American linden and botanically as Tilia Americana.  This takes some doing, as it stands some distance from the path amongst impenetrable thicket; one year we missed it altogether.  Growing naturally from New England to North Dakota and into the upper South, basswood thrives in rich, damp bottomland soils but also makes a living on drier slopes, too.  Pyramidal in youth and aging to oblong or rounded in shape, it can reach 60 feet tall or much higher.  The dark green, heart-shaped leaves hide small pale yellow flowers, which appear in June and lure scads of honeybees and other pollinators.  Crafty beekeepers take advantage of this situation by placing hives in linden groves and taking the honey produced off as soon as the linden flowers fade. It is described as pale-colored, medium sweet, and highly aromatic.  Basswoods are rarely found in home landscapes, although they sometimes appear in parks or on golf courses.  Passed up in favor of the littleleaf linden, darling of European horticulture which has spread here, perhaps someday we’ll prize our native version here as highly as I regard the lone wolf on Papscanee.