by Cheryl Rofer
A few months back, I showed you my very pruned chamisa bushes. I never did get around to the other big ones I wanted to try to tame; maybe next year. They're all blooming now, that brilliant gold color that lasts only for a week or so. There are supposed to be a couple of cold fronts headed toward us for the end of the week, so that will probably be when they dry out. These three photos are in the same order as I showed the bushes after they had been pruned and grown out a bit.
I thought that this past weekend I could clean the hummingbird feeders and put them away, but as I refilled them last night, one hummingbird was wistfully checking out the position one feeder is usually in, and this morning, as I photographed the chamisa, two were still fighting out whose territory it was, and I think there may have been a third.
It's the young ones, or perhaps the females, that stay behind. It's very difficult to tell them apart. The mature males were tanking up for the long haul at least a month ago and are long gone. What I keep wondering is if it's the immatures that leave last, how do they know where to fly?
When the chamisa blooms, people claim it causes their allergies. It's certainly obviously in bloom, and there are great fields of it. I must have eight or ten large plants like these and any number of smaller ones in my yard. I did get around to pruning some of the smaller ones so that maybe I'll head off their being too sprawly.
But there are many things blooming at this time of year, their last gasp to produce seeds. Here's the best writeup I can find on chamisa, Ericameria nauseosa; not as good as some I've found for other plants. Nauseosa, yes. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: chamisa scent is like something you have to scrape off your shoe, with a too-sweet addition. Here's another version, probably from a New Yorker who has spent all of five minutes in Santa Fe, not at all close to a chamisa bush in bloom, impressed by our mountains and views and chamisa's vivid yellow.
I don't think that chamisa contributes much to fall allergies, unless you bury your face in that yellow. Chamisa is in the sunflower and aster family, Compositae. Dust your fingers across the blooms and they'll pick up the heavy yellow pollen that needs to be moved by pollinators like the painted lady butterflies (too shy for photos) that were dancing around those plants this morning. Allergies need light, wind-scattered pollen like that from hairy bursage, of which I still have too much in my yard. Anything with conspicuous flowers in unlikely to cause allergy. The flowers are conspicuous to attract the pollinators needed to move that heavy pollen.