[ Lost in the Landscape ]

friday blooms–banned in several states, sorta

Today’s flower pho­tos are of the first blooms of the sea­son on Salvia divi­no­rum, a plant that seemed like an appro­pri­ate choice to high­light for the 75th anniver­sary of Repeal Day, the end of Pro­hi­bi­tion in the United States.

This is a plant with a cou­ple of bad rep­u­ta­tion points against it.

Robin Mid­dle­ton, one of Britain’s big gurus on the genus Salvia, gave up on the plant: “Native to a remote part of Mex­ico, this is one of the most dif­fi­cult salvias to get into flower…I have dis­carded this salvia, as mine never flowered.”

And Betsy Cleb­sch, one of the Bay Area’s high priest­esses of the genus and author of The New Book of Salvias: Salvias for Every Gar­den, writes: “On sev­eral occa­sions I have grown the plant in a green­house but have never suc­ceeded in get­ting my plants to flower.”

My plants are new to the gar­den so my expe­ri­ence with the plant is pretty lim­ited. But it appears that given the right con­di­tions, even in the hands of a non-expert like me, that first rap of never flow­er­ing appears to be undeserved.

The sec­ond rap against this salvia comes from the fact that its tra­di­tional med­i­c­i­nal uses and role in shaman­is­tic div­ina­tion don’t square with some notions of of what peo­ple should be doing with the plants in the nat­ural world. Sev­eral states have recent laws on the books against pro­cess­ing the plant or pack­ag­ing it for human con­sump­tion. For­tu­nately there seem to be exemp­tions for peo­ple using it for orna­men­tal, hor­ti­cul­tural pur­poses. Sev­eral coun­tries, includ­ing Aus­tralia, Den­mak and Italy exert some sort of con­trol over the plant. (Bet­ter con­sult your lawyer or Wikipedia before plant­ing it and giv­ing it away to all your friends…)

What are its effects, and what’s all the fuss? you might ask. But I’m the wrong per­son to ask since my drugs of choice tend towards caf­feine, choco­late and occa­sional hits of refined sugar. (Sam’s cof­fee cart at work offers a mocha-chip scone that hits all three addic­tion points!) And for altered states of con­scious­ness I pre­fer to look at art, lis­ten to music or read a book. But by gen­eral accounts this plant has no record of addic­tion and is prob­a­bly less dan­ger­ous than alco­hol and tobacco.

Why grow it? It looks cool! (Check out the white fuzz on the indi­vid­ual flow­ers!) It has a fas­ci­nat­ing eth­nob­otan­i­cal back­ground. And the fact that some peo­ple want to ban it is alone a good rea­son as far as I’m con­cerned. Plants are inter­est­ing all on their own, but when a plant rep­re­sents a micro­cosm of issues cir­cu­lat­ing through cul­ture it gets to be really fas­ci­nat­ing. (Vocab­u­larly word of the day: synec­doche.)

The image to the right shows a new bloom spike with the devel­op­ing vio­let calyxes.

If they come after this plant, what’s next? All those lovely opium pop­pies in your gardens?

What opium pop­pies? They’re just “Ori­en­tal pop­pies,” you might say. But they’re no less opium pop­pies than what’s grown in the Afghan high­lands as part of the drug trade. What do you think the “som­niferum” in their sci­en­tific name (Papaver som­niferum) alludes to? Next time you buy a plant from some­where you’re tech­ni­cally con­tribut­ing to traf­fick­ing in a Sched­ule II con­trolled sub­stance. (Check out Michael Pollan’s 1997 Harper’s Mag­a­zine arti­cle, “Opium made easy.”)

And then there are all those highly poi­so­nous plants like fox­glove, or species that could eas­ily be mod­i­fied for bioter­ror­ism uses like cas­tor bean. Can peo­ple be trusted to have those plants in their gardens?

It’s a slip­pery slope. A slip­pery slope, I tell you. In the mean­time proudly grow your pop­pies and fox­gloves and salvias. Keep your gar­dens free!

Let me go back to the cul­ti­va­tion ques­tion that I started with. Betsy Cleb­sch in the 2003 edi­tion of her book reported that, “I have found it impos­si­ble to find any­thing writ­ten about it in gar­den­ing or hor­ti­cul­tural mag­a­zines or books; my infor­ma­tion comes from botan­i­cal and eth­no­batan­i­cal descrip­tions and from con­ver­sa­tions with those who have grown the plant.” The web now has a cer­tain amount of infor­ma­tion on how to grow the plant, and below are my notes.

What I’m doing: One of the two husky rooted cut­tings from two-inch pots went into a gal­lon con­tainer with cheap pot­ting soil into a shady, humid and unheated green­house and was kept con­stantly moist. The other went into the ground (sandy soil with­out many amend­ments) in a shady spot in a raised bed next to the gar­den pond and was watered when­ever I remem­bered to do it.

The pot­ted green­house plant grew fairly upright, but has that pale, gaunt look of some peo­ple who live in dark apart­ments. The plant in the ground hasn’t grown as tall, but looks more robust, putting out more in the way of basal growths. The flow­er­ing plant shown here is the one from the green­house, but the one out­doors is putting out a bloom stalk and seems to be a cou­ple weeks behind the first one in bloom­ing. The plants are dif­fer­ent culti­gens, so the dif­fer­ence in their behav­ior prob­a­bly has some­thing to do with that. But both seem to respond to bright but min­i­mal direct sun­light and average-moist con­di­tions at the roots.

Happy grow­ing!

December 05 2008 | Categories: gardening • plant profiles | Tags: controlled substances • drugs • ethnobotany • opium poppies • Salvia divinorum | 5 Comments »