Notes From My Knapsack 6-11-06
Jeff Gill

‘Round the World In Your Yard

June has left behind most wild flowers, with some blossoms showing up on a few trees. The real display is now in yards and house margins where industrious homeowners have planted annuals around beds of fairly standard perennials.
Petunias, begonias, marigolds, irises, plus rose bushes starting to bud and flower, are now on display around hostas, ferns, ivy, and the stray boxwood.
Rhododendron plants are common around Licking County, with various colors and forms giving some variety (along with the related azalea) to the woody branches sprawling around house corners and up hillsides.
A discussion about the relative "nativeness" of rhododendron took your scrivener down some googlicious pathways. My scraps of Greek told me that the name, at least, comes from a "tree (dendros) of Rhodes (a Greek isle)" which is clearly not in Ohio.
It turns out that many ornamental and familiar plants we see in common yards, let alone highly maintained gardens, have histories as tangled as my family tree, covering about as much ground.
Rhododendron, for instance, is native to this area not far away, but many of the hybrids and "cultivars" we see are descended from Himalayan stock, from 7000 feet in altitude and more. Obviously, this builds some challenges into the genome of this plant.
Likewise roses are found all around the northern hemisphere, going back in the fossil record more than 30 million years, but mostly pink until 1600 or so, when the Age of Exploration also became the Age of Garden Obsession. Yellow roses found in Afghanistan and southeast Asia sparked creative gardening and grafting, leading to the rainbow of colors found today, but also a congenital weakness to diseases like blackspot.
The Greek word "rainbow" is, in fact, "iris," and many yards have seen a beautiful stand of irises in a literal rainbow of color shoot up, but while irises and their cousins the day lily are found all over, many grown today are Japanese and Siberian in origin.
Most of us, even with black thumbs, know that Holland is famous for tulips, but how many know that the Dutch got them from the souks of Istanbul? Current research shows that the tulips secretively traded to the West from the Ottoman Empire actually came from Lebanon, on Mount Hermon’s slopes, and the heights of eastern Turkey and Kazakhstan.
Marigolds are deer repellent, and hence popular ‘round here, and are native to the New World. They were recorded by Cortez as sacred flowers of the Aztecs, crossing the Atlantic twice to get thousands of miles north of their origin to our gardens. They went from New Spain back to the Old World, where marigolds were bred in Spanish monastery gardens, and then back to America after the Revolution.
Petunias come from Brazil, begonias from Puerto Rico, and hostas grew first on the prairies of China and Korea.
Geraniums stem from South Africa, and impatiens, SE Asia, India, except of course New Guinea impatiens, which come from . . .
Peony, the official state flower of Indiana, comes originally from China, and to no one’s surprise the regal chrysanthemum traces a royal lineage to imperial China and Japan.

And Granville’s beloved daffodils are actually "narcissus," with a Greek heritage but our yellow flowered favorites seen first in southwestern Europe.
To see an everyday flowerbed to the roots, you need an up-to-date passport!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he knows more paleoethnobotany than he does gardening, but tell him a flower power tale at disciple@voyager.net.