RX for Jaded Senses

Are individualists. They open in the afternoon, so if you want to photograph them you must go after lunch. Most all night blooming flowers (perhaps all of them) are white or light colored so that their pollinating insects can find them.

One morning I picked five Arizona poppies (Kallstroemia grandiflora) before they opened, thinking to photograph them while they were fresh. I placed them on the porch where the early sun could strike them, and sat down with my camera to watch. As the sun touched them, the petals slowly opened and from each poppy stepped a small leaf-cutter bee, his face all covered with yellow pollen. Each bee brushed and combed and washed himself thoroughly before he flew away to his breakfast. The young bees had had a good night's sleep safe and secure in their poppy hammocks. The photograph? I was so fascinated with the little drama that I forgot to click the camera! The leaves of the Arizona poppy fold up at night also, like tiny hands. It is thought that it may be due to their sensitivity to light and dark.

There was a time, millions of years ago, when there were no flowering plants, and no seasons as we know them now. There was also a time when there were no cactus plants in certain moist valleys, but only the ancient ancestors of the roses. When earth upheavals created the deserts, the roses in those areas that survived, changed their leaves and stems to cactus to retain moisture, and their thorns to spines for better protection from hungry animals, but they kept their rose-like blossoms. Science explains the transforming morphosis in technical terms, but I, whose business it is to translate technical terms into lay men's language, and who love the desert flowers because they give my spirit a lift, still wonder what inscrutable force gave them the knowhow of survival.

The desert starleaf is one of the delicate plants that needs to grow within a sturdy shrub for support. But as the flowers have to be pollinated by insects, they stretch up high above the shrub on their fragile stems so the insects can find them.

Scarlet hummingbird flowers are pollinated by both insects and hummingbirds. Somewhere in their journey through time they discovered that it was a good idea to mass their colors in large quantities, and also to add fragrance in order to better attract their pollinators. Nature does curious things to insure the survival of species.

Flowers furnish the sole food for hundreds of insect species and numerous birds, particularly the hummingbirds. In return for their food they perform the necessary work of pollination, without which there would be no flowers, including those of our fruits and vegetables.

While waiting for butterflies to light on a flowering desert broom in the yard of our friends, Jim and Evelyn Cope at their E Lazy J ranch, I counted insects. There were well over a hun dred individuals sipping nectar from the tiny white flowers. These included 8 species of butterflies, 3 of bees, 5 of wasps, 5 species of flies, and 10 unidentified species. The exquisite little flower that blooms unseen by mortals in a lonely bower has, without doubt, been fashioned by nature to provide food for some mysterious insect, and perhaps for other important purposes as yet unknown.

The early Indians knew the medicinal values of flowers and plants, and today's medical laboratories work with them.

One spring I found some strange purple flowers which I sent to one of the universities for identification. Within a week a researcher from the College of Medicine called at our place for directions to the spot. He was doing research work on that species in quest of a possible cure for cancer.

We are told that buttercups were the first to produce color for advertising their wares. Flowers of the buttercup family are identified as such by their glossy sheen.

Many flowers have improved on their advertising gimmicks. For example, the flower of the blue paloverde ( (so called because of its blue-green bark) has five yellow petals, one of which is offset to form an insect landing platform. The flower of the yellow paloverde has four yellow petals and a white offset insect landing platform, while the flower of the Mexican paloverde has four yellow petals and a red-spotted insect landing platform. It would be interesting to know what different insects are so choosy in their colors.

It is said that there have been attempts among the flowers to discontinue color advertising. For example, the sunflower that tried to be different from its family became the ragweed.

It is claimed that numerous plants today are in the process of changing. Some that have progressed ahead too rapidly have had to retrace their steps, such as the plants whose leaves have to do the work of the flower cups. Edith and Frederic Clements, in their article, Flower Pageant of the Midwest, in the National Geographic Magazine, August 1939, described many of the curious changes in the flower world. I am indebted to them for some of this information.

Somewhere along the line the grasses left their ancestral family, the lilies and their traditional pollinators. Today all grasses have to be pollinated by the wind.

The desert lily (Hesperocallis undulata) blooms only after a wet season. After its tiny black seed sprouts, it sends a shoot down deep in the earth sometimes from 18 to 24 inches, where it produces a bulb. The bulb lies in the ground until there is a wet season when sufficient moisture penetrates to insure sprout ing, growth, and fruitage.

Joshua tree blooms are cross pollinated by a small gray moth, Pronuba synthetica, who gathers pollen, climbs into the bell-shaped blossom and pushes the pollen into the flower cup, where she lays her egg. Her grub doesn't eat the pollen. The timing is such that it feeds on part of the seeds. The rest are left to produce more trees. Without the moth there would be no Joshua trees, and without the Joshuas there would be no Pronuba synthetica. No one knows which came first, the tree or the moth, or if they appeared simultaneously on the earth in that unknown time. Each species of yucca, the Joshua is a yucca, has its own species of Pronuba moth. The story of the moth and the yucca has been written numerous times. One of the most outstanding was written by the late Joseph Wood Krutch, which inspired Mrs. Andree Robinson to devote 5 years of painstaking night work photographing the little moth. The story and photographs were published in ARIZONA HIGHWAYS February 1969.

The beautiful blue vervain, sometimes called mountain verbena, is one of the showy flowers of the pinyon and ponderosa pine forests. But it is also one of the spring flowers found along Highway 93 toward the Joshua forest, and near Wicken burg in Blue Tank Wash. Its botanical name is Verbena bipin natifida. It belongs to the Vervain Family. Text continued on page 9

Highland meadow of wildflowers dominated by the majestic San Francisco Peaks on the northern horizon.

"I see, smell, taste, hear, feel, that everlasting something to which we are allied, at once our maker, our abode, our destiny, our very selves, the one historic truth, the most remarkable fact which can become the distinct and uninvited subject of our thought, the actual glory of the universe; the only fact which a human being cannot avoid recognizing, or in some way forget or dispense with.

We need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life . . . for certainly there is a life of the mind above the wants of the body, and independent of it . . . such as no human institutions give out, the early morning fragrance of the world, antediluvian, strength, and hope imparting. They who scent it can never faint . . . Nature, the earth herself, is the only panacea."