Tag: photography

From “Pyrethrum” in A History of Entomology (1931) by E. O. Essig:

“The use of pyrethrum as an insecticide was early held as a secret in Transcaucasia where the plants, locally known as Persian camomile, flea-grass, or flea killer, grew wild in the Caucasus Mountains…. An Armenian merchant, Jumtikoff, who traveled through this region about 1807 or 1817, noted the value of the prepared powder and transmitted the information to his son who prepared the insecticide in sufficient quantities for export in 1828. The plant was soon afterwards introduced from the Russian Caucasus into Alexandropol and subsequently into Germany, where its value was quickly recognized. A powder was made from the dry flower heads and an infusion from the dry leaves. A volatile oil is the active principle as an insecticide….

“The Caucasian plant was generally known as Pyrethrum roseum and is now referred to as Chrysanthemum coccineum…. The material made from this plant was commercially called Persian insect powder. In Dalmatia, Jugoslavia, a similar insect powder was produced and as carefully guarded as a secret. It was known in the trade as Dalmatian insect powder and was produced from a plant, Pyrethrum cinerariaefolium, claimed to be a native of that region. It was many years before seeds could be procured to grow either of these plants elsewhere.

“The powder from the Caucasus of Persia and also from Dalmatia was introduced into France to destroy household insects about 1850. Some raw material was secured a few years later and it was definitely determined that the powder from the Caucasus was the best. Accordingly in 1856 seeds were procured from the latter place and sown on September 15, 1856, and the few plants raised produced enough seed to establish the industry in France in 1857…. The industry in France was carefully guarded to prevent the dissemination of seeds to other countries.

“G. N. Milco, a native of Dalmatia, a resident of Stockton, California, and afterwards a member of the State Board of Horticulture of California, secured a few seeds from Gravosa in 1876, which he tried out and found successful. The species grown by him was considered to be Pyrethrum cinerariaefolium… by most of the writers of that time…. Soon after its introduction, Milco organized the Buhach Producing and Manufacturing Company at Stockton….”

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Hello!

This is the fourth of four posts with photos that I took in late November and the first two weeks of December, of Aster family members that I identified as Tanacetum coccineum. The first post is Technicolor Tanacetum (1 of 4); the second post is Technicolor Tanacetum (2 of 4); and the third post is Technicolor Tanacetum (3 of 4). The photos in this post continue to show the presence of multiple flowers on single stems with distinct colors — something that’s even more visually impressive when the plant blooms in cascading vertical or horizontal clusters.

When I photographed Tanacetum coccineum at Oakland Cemetery and started learning about its botanical history, I had no idea I was going to discover so much intense coverage of the plants’ adoption as an insecticide — which stretches from its Asian roots three thousand years ago, through our current century.

The development of pyrethrum-based insecticides occurred in Europe and the United States in alignment with growing scientific study of plant characteristics and how to botanically or genetically manipulate them. The excerpt from A History of Entomology by E. O. Essig is noteworthy in that regard: the book is considered a seminal study of the worlds of insects, and the author devotes a consequential chapter to the development of the insecticide from Tanacetum coccineum (previously called Chrysanthemum coccineum or Pyrethrum roseum), covering it from the early nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century.

Essig’s account is one that includes elements of a good capitalist greed story, including secrecy, closely guarded manufacturing secrets, and intense competition to capture and flood markets with proven insect control capabilities that would extend from crop management to household use. These characteristics, of course, align with European and American industrialization, but the extension to household use meant that pyrethrum-based insecticides could hook into the burgeoning markets for consumer-oriented convenience products for which the period between the 1850s and 1950s is economically notable.

In his pyrethrum history, the author includes this 1881 Buhach Producing and Manufacturing Company advertisement…

… directed at property owners seeking to banish bugs from their homes. When I saw that advertisement — with its cloud of fanciful insects targeted by pyrethrum mist — I remembered those commercials common in the 1960s and 1970s that featured animated cartoon insects encountering a can of Raid insecticide, as they raced away from the spray screaming and slipping into comas, fading behind the commercial’s well-known branding: “Raid: Kills Bugs Dead!” If you’d like to see some of those commercials, there’s a collection of 125 of them on YouTube going back to 1948, at Raid History Commercials.

This might seem like one of my blogging amusables, but there’s also a connection to the entire pyrethrum/pyrethrin historical thread: Raid, according to its Wikipedia article, initially used a chemical called allethrin, and allethrin — produced in 1949 — was the first synthetic version of the natural insecticide found in Tanacetum plants. This enabled subsequent development of a greater volume of more targeted and longer-lasting insecticides; though pyrethrum insecticides are still used and produced, and are often part of organic farming because they’re a natural (rather than chemically created) form of insect control.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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From “Pyrethrum” in Flowers and Their Histories by Alice M. Coats:

“Pyrethrum roseum (syn. Chrysanthemum coccineum), parent of the hardy border pyrethrums so valuable for cutting, was introduced from the Caucasus at a date variously reported as 1804, 1818 or 1826. At first it was not very greatly esteemed, and indeed the flower as it was portrayed in Maund’s Botanic Garden in 1830 is not very attractive; its pink florets are short in relation to the disc and the whole flower rather overwhelmed by its abundant leafage. Some years later, however, a large rose form was raised by M. Themisterre, a Belgian florist, and was sent by him to Mr. John Salter of Hammersmith, under whose care the centre of the flower was gradually filled and the double form evolved. The varieties raised by this nurseryman were reported to be ‘very numerous, various and beautiful and to include shades of white, pink, red and crimson, singly or in combination’….

“From the early days of its cultivation it was known that this plant was a principal ingredient in the manufacture of Persian insect-powder; and its near relation, P. cinerariifolia, was used for the same purpose in Dalmatia. The powder is produced from the flower-heads, which are cut just as they are about to open, carefully dried, and pulverized; and ‘Pyrethrum-powder’ as an insecticide has become of increasing importance in the present century. Pyrethrums are grown for this purpose in Kenya, and were considered a crop of the first priority during the last war, for their value in the control of insect pests and the prevention of typhus and other insect-spread diseases….

“The Greek name comes from pyr, meaning fire, and was originally given to a plant with a hot, biting root, which the early botanists identified with another nearly-related plant, now called Anthemis pyrethrum or Pellitory of Spain. This is rather a tender species, grown here before 1570, but subsequently lost, and reintroduced by Philip Miller in 1732, when he raised some plants from seeds he found sticking to a bunch of Malaga raisins. The root of this plant was formerly used as a cure for toothache; but it is no longer in cultivation as a garden-flower.”

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Hello!

This is the third of four posts with photos that I took in late November and the first two weeks of December, of Aster family members that I identified as Tanacetum coccineum. The first post is Technicolor Tanacetum (1 of 4), and the second post is Technicolor Tanacetum (2 of 4).

In the previous two posts for this series, I showed photos of these Painted Daisies where the flowers featured a single dominant color, or the flower petals showed shades or blends of single colors. To illustrate that more precisely, here’s a photo from the second post, next to one from this post.

Both photos show the plants producing more than one flower on a single stem, but those in the photo on the left are quite different from those on the right. On the left, we see the petals all contain shades of the same colors (purples through magenta); whereas the plant on the right produced flowers with distinct colors: one yellow, two orange, one pink, and even — barely visible behind the middle pink flower — one that has purple petals. This variation would not have been a natural accident; it would have been produced intentionally by breeders seeking to develop a variant with these color capabilities. Even those plants that have only produced two flowers (like the first three in my galleries below) show the same capability: they produce one orange and one yellow flower, rather than just varying shades of orange or yellow throughout their petals.

With a breeding history stretching back thousands of years, these color variations depart significantly from the colors present in historically native plants in the Tanacetum and Chrysanthemum genera — which would have been yellow, white, or red (like those in my first post), depending on whether they originated from Asia or the Caucasus region. Blending colors in single flowers, or creating plants capable of producing flowers each with two or three distinct colors, would have occurred through genetic manipulation of hundreds of plant generations where the presence of certain color traits was selectively emphasized.

The plant we now call Tanacetum coccineum (previously known as Chrysanthemum coccineum and as Pyrethrum roseum) has had a long botanical history through Asian and Western cultures, with Chinese chrysanthemum breeding known to have occurred as far back as 1500 BC.  As I noted in the first post in this series, there’s a separation reflecting how differently Tanacetum coccineum was represented in botanical history: it was likely not distinguished from chrysanthemums in ancient Chinese or Japanese culture, and wasn’t separated from the Chrysanthemum genus until the twentieth century, when the names Chrysanthemum coccineum and Pyrethrum roseum began to fade from botanical literature. The quotation at the top of this post — from Alice Coats’ Flowers and Their Histories, published in the mid-twentieth century while these name changes were in flux — partially addresses the name ambiguities (which we’re used to by now, right?). While its names vary, however, there is something common to every accounting of Tanacetum that I’ve seen so far: the use of its chemical components as insecticides, or as the basis for manufactured insecticides, embedded throughout the entire 3000-year period where humans have documented the plant’s history. We’ll take a look at the significance — and uniqueness — of those historical threads in the fourth post in this series.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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From “The Killing Plants” in Dangerous Garden: The Quest for Plants to Change Our Lives by David C. Stuart:

“Various tanacetums, including the herbaceous red or pink Tanacetum coccineum familiar in our gardens, yield [a] popular insecticide. T. cinerariafolium, in particular, is widely farmed for its pyrethrum. This substance rapidly kills aphids and caterpillars. It also kills beneficial arthropod predators such as lacewings, hoverflies and ladybird larvae. However, as it decays rapidly in air, vanishing within twelve hours, plants sprayed in the evening will not poison bees alighting on them the following morning. It is one of the oldest and safest insecticides available. The pyrethrum paralyses insects almost immediately, to spectacular effect. Many of the immobilized insects later recover.”

From The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoe Schlanger:

“All around me are complex adaptive systems. Each creature is folded into layers of interrelationship with surrounding creatures that cascade from the largest to the smallest scale. The plants with the soil, the soil with its microbes, the microbes with the plants, the plants with the fungi, the fungi with the soil. The plants with the animals that graze on them and pollinate them. The plants with each other. The whole beautiful mess defies categorization….

“Plants are the very definition of creative becoming: they are in constant motion, albeit slow motion, probing the air and soil in a relentless quest for a livable future….

“A life spent constantly growing yet rooted in a single spot comes with tremendous challenges. To meet them, plants have come up with some of the most creative methods for surviving of any living thing, us included. Many are so ingenious that they seem nearly impossible for an order of life we’ve mostly relegated to the margins of our own lives, the decoration that frames the theatrics of being an animal.”

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Hello!

This is the second of four posts with photos that I took in late November and the first two weeks of December, of Aster family members that I identified as Tanacetum coccineum, though they are similar in appearance to the Chrysanthemum genus plants Chrysanthemum × morifolium and Chrysanthemum indicum. The first post is Technicolor Tanacetum (1 of 4).

With the photos in this second post, we visually transition from the solid-colored (mostly red) flowers to those where the petals show blended colors, which we can imagine helped give rise to one of the plant’s common names (that is still used today): Painted Daisy. With the last three photos in this post, we begin to see the expression of less blended, more distinctly different colors — which will be even more evident in the remaining series photos.

The first excerpt I included at the top of this post — from Dangerous Garden: The Quest for Plants to Change Our Lives by David C. Stuart — is only six sentences, but those rich sentences tell us a lot about the evolution of plant adaptation and survival strategies. If natural history was a cartoon, you might imagine a group of Tanacetum plants huddling together 300 million years ago to develop a plan for fending off aphid hordes, which — as any gardener who’s seen one of their invasions knows — can be very determined about chomping on a plant’s leaves and stems until there’s not a lot of leaf or stem left.

What more likely would have happened in real life rather than our cartoon, though, is that some Tanacetum plants — probably as a result of a chemical reaction to the aphid invaders — managed to produce a compound that paralyzed the aphids “to spectacular effect.” Those plants thrived better than species members that didn’t produce the compound, and passed the chemical formula to subsequent generations. That this chemical compound — which we humans call pyrethrin, a name that gave rise to the old plant genus name Pyrethrum — evolved over thousands of generations to target specific insect families and dissipate after a few hours are both fascinating elements of the story: the targeting and dissipation ensure that the plants wouldn’t prevent other, more desirable insects from fulfilling their roles as pollinators.

Should you happen to have some insecticide around, you can check the ingredients and find chemicals like bifenthrin or cypermethrin listed. These chemicals are synthetically produced but were modeled after pyrethrins. They were designed to emulate how Tanacetum pyrethrin targets specific insects while being more persistent than the natural compound — which dissipates within hours — so that the insecticide can keep an area clear of undesirable pests for days, weeks, or even months, demonstrating how humans adapted a plant’s evolved defense strategy and modified it to meet the needs of commercial pest control applications.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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