Silene plankii

I finished writing up my New Mexcico Native Plants Facebook post for January and I thought I'd see if it can do double duty as a blogpost, too.  Here's my essay on Silene plankii, this month's rare or endangered plant.  

It only required cutting and pasting followed by removing extra lines at the paragraph breaks.  The images didn't come over, so they had to be inserted manually.  There are a few glitches with fonts that don't seem to be easy to fix.  Otherwise, a quick and simple process.  

Expect to see more of these on days when there is little garden news--I have over a year's worth already posted that I can repost here.  Typically, I post a rare plant essay on the last Saturday of each month. 

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This month's rare plant of the month has not gone extinct. I've finally worked through all four of the New Mexican plant species that are regarded as recently extinct. On that uplifting note, let us explore Silene plankii C.L. Hitchcock & Maguire or Plank's catchfly. The genus Silene is a member of the Pink family, the Caryophyllaceae, which in turn gives rise to the name of the order, the Caryophyllales. There are perhaps as many as 600 species of catchfly.

The specific epithet, plankii, refers to Elisha Newton Plank, a late 19^th Century botanist and collector in the Southwest. Plank was self-taught and based out of Wyandott, Kansas. Between 1880 and 1900 he made trips as far west as Texas and I assume it is on one of these trips, he collected the Silene that would later bear his name near El Paso. Check out his biographical sketch at http://www.calflora.net/botanicalnames/pagePI-PY.html.

The first authority is Charles Leo Hitchcock, a noted 20^th Century botanist who taught at the University of Washington. He is the principle author of the Flora of the Pacific Northwest, a 1973 text that is still the standard for the region. [Side note: Hitchcock co-authored this flora with Arthur Cronquist, who is my academic “grandfather” so to speak.]

Bassett Maguire, the other authority of this species, started the Intermountain Herbarium at Utah State before going on to an illustrious career at the New York Botanical Garden. His life story is briefly summarized at https://amp.google-wiki.info/45701246/1/bassett-maguire.html.

The description given at New Mexico Rare Plants is:

Low perennial, from multicipital caudex; stems ascending, 10-15 cm high, finely retrorsely grayish puberulent, becoming glandular in the inflorescence; basal and lowest stem leaves usually withered at anthesis; stem leaves 5-8 pairs, linear, acuminate, 1-1.5(2) cm long, 1-2 mm broad, largest near middle of stem, finely glandular-puberulent, especially near the inflorescence; inflorescence few-flowered, often a single terminal flower, or one or two flowers developing from lower nodes; calyces 21-23(28) mm long, tubular, slightly constricted below, glandular-pubescent, 10-nerved, the lobes 2-4 mm long, membranous-margined and ciliolate; corolla scarlet, the claws glabrous, about 22 mm long, gradually and uniformly widening to 3-4 mm at top, scarcely auriculate, but abruptly narrowed to blades, blades about 8 mm long, bilobed 1/6-2/3 length, the lobes entire or rather deeply crenate, appendages located at least 1 mm above base of blade, 1-1.5 mm long, oblong, rather deeply crenate-lacerate; filaments well exserted; styles 3, exserted 2-4 mm; ovary one-celled. Flowering July and September.

This plant is one of two catchflies in New Mexico with red flowers, the other being the rather common and widespread Silene laciniata, which has stems greater than 20 cm (8 in) tall, shorter calyx 1.5-2 cm long, and laciniate [bordered with a fringe; especially: cut into deep irregular usually pointed lobes] rather than bilobed petals.

Our Silene is found in scattered small populations from the Sandia Mountains south to Dona Ana County and into the Franklin Mountains near El Paso. Sightings are reported in Sandoval, Sierra, Socorro, and Torrance counties. The plant appears to be restricted to mountains near the Rio Grande and it favors igneous cliffs and rocky outcrops; 1,500-2,800 m (5,000-9,200 ft).

By way of an example, here's the map from iNaturalist showing a sighting in the Sandias a little above 8,000 ft just a short scramble from the saddle where the Piedra Lisa Trail tops out above the Juan Tabo drainage. At the junction with the Rincon Spur Trail, one would have to bushwhack northwest along the ridge to get to this population.

There's good news and bad news for our catchfly. The good news is that it's populations are widely disjunct and it would be unlikely for all of them to succumb to disturbances. The bad news is that the plant was probably once more widely distributed during cooler periods of climate. Of course, the climate isn't getting any cooler, so expect populations of this Silene to get pushed farther up in elevation. In the Sandias, that gives them about 2,000 ft before they hit the limestone band at the summit of the mountains.

With modern DNA analysis techniques available to us, it should be possible to look back through time as different populations accumulate different mutations. That would give us a better understanding on when these groups separated. In turn that information could be correlated with paleo-climatological and geological data to gain insight into the evolution of our flora in general.