Weather: As usual, the predicted snow did not arrive this past week. It looked like a quarter inch outside my front door on Thursday. There was no moisture in the top layer of the ground when I was out working Saturday. I noticed some pines were turning brown on Tuesday. A dry, cold winter is hard on plants.
Last token snow: 12/30. Week’s low: 14 degrees F. Week’s high: 55 degrees F in the shade. Winds were up to 25 mph in Santa Fé on Saturday.
What’s still green: Needles on pines, piñon, cultivated and native junipers; leaves on cliff rose, yuccas, winecup mallows, alfilerillo, coral bells; bases of blue flax and Mexican hats
What’s still gray or gray-green: Leaves of four-winged saltbushes, winterfat
What’s turning purple or red: Leaves on coral beard tongues; stems on some roses; twigs on apricot, peaches, spirea, and globe willow
What’s turned yellow: Branches on weeping willows
Animal sightings: The only birds I see are crows
Tasks: The warm afternoons without winds were ideal for working outdoors, if one dressed warmly. When I was out Monday, I started to clear a slab of cement buried by the fence builder. I found it was at least a foot wide and at least two feet long. The soil was like sand. It doesn’t hold water, and nothing grows, so the water must be hitting it and flowing downhill. This may be the ultimate cause of the serious erosion that starts at the end of the slab.
Weekly update: New Year’s means having to create new files for taking plant notes. I copy the last one, and delete the year’s details, while leaving the list of plants and locations. This week I noticed my oldest plants have been here for 27 years. Some have been here longer than some natives.
In 1995, one of the local hardware stores still was getting decent chrysanthemums. The rest of the perennials from that year came from Santa Fe Greenhouse: coral beard tongues, perennial four o’clock, and the purple coneflowers.
The next year, 26 years ago, I bought some species daylilies from a mail order company, and the Mexican hats and tansy from Santa Fe Greenhouse.
25 years ago, in 1997, I started having some success with shrubs. My lilacs came from Home Base and Rowlands in Albuquerque, my peach and roses of Sharon from the other local hardware store. I had more success with mail order houses, and got my baptisia and caryopteris that way. My Mary Stoker chrysanthemum came from Weiss Brothers.
My oldest non-native plant is a hitchhiker. I bought some pots of Silver King artemisia in 1986 from Nichols seed company. My very first notes were that it did well and moved about. It got mixed in with something I brought here from Michigan and naturalized. This climate suited it better than the north.
It still threatens to invade. I keep it out of the watered beds, but it spreads outside their borders where it kills the native vegetation. First it gets about 18" tall, then it flops over in the winter. That smothers what was there, and so it creates its own environment.
I don’t name companies in this blog. I made an exception for this post for all those who have disappeared. The Albuquerque and Santa Fé stores made some poor business decisions. The mail order companies may still exist, but they long ago stopped shipping plants. They have disappeared as suppliers but they linger on in their perennials and shrubs. A toast to them on this New Year’s Day.
Notes on photographs:
1. My earliest picture of the Silver King (Artemisia ludovicianna albua), 27 August 2006. By then it had been here since for 15 years, and was 31 years old.
2. The cement left by the fence builder, 26 December 2026. It extends several more inches under the soil to the right.
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