CERRILLOS HILLS HISTORIC PARK

The medicinal or remedio uses referenced in this text are solely to inform the reader of the traditional and historical folkways of the people of New Mexico. This information is not medical advice. Always consult your physician before using any medicinal product.

With sturdy stalks and spade-shaped leaves, sunflowers thrive in open and disturbed areas. They are especially common during August and September along roads. The yellow 4-inch 'flower' is really composed of a central cluster of disk flowers that have no petals surrounded by a circle of yellow ray flowers. It may grow to ten feet in height.

The domesticated sunflower originated in this area, north of Mexico, but the lack of local archaeological evidence suggests the actual domestication of the plant took place south of here. Into modern times the sunflower seems to like to spread along trade routes. The very large commercially cultivated sunflowers are descendant from this plant.

In the old village of La Bajada Añlis called castillo. A wash made of leaves is used for aches and rheumatism.

The dried stems have been used for snares and arrows and flutes. The sap has been used to treat cuts. But most important in the old days was the sunflower seed as seasonal food, parched and eaten whole or ground into a meal to be used in many recipes.

A showy, all-summer-blooming annual daisy, 1 to 2 feet in height. The pictured spring bloom will soon develop a red coloration to the root of all its petals.

An annual that prefers sandy soil, with a distinctive pastel blue-to-white flower that has an unusually long flower-tube, up to 2 inches in length. Head-on, the flowers have the shape of a star.

The medicinal applications of blue trumpets extend from fevers and swelling to broken bones, and a tea was used as an emetic.

A small annual herb, common purslane spreads low to the ground. In midsummer tiny yellow flowers appear in its flat fleshy leaf axils (crevice of leaf and stem), followed by capsules filled with shiny black seeds.

The Old World common purslane arrived in New Mexico in historic times and has nearly replaced the old native purslanes, but Notchleaf purslane [P. retusa] was clearly one of the most important wild food plants for the ancestral people. It was one of the important wild greens available in New Mexico throughout the summer. The succulent stems and leaves are boiled, fried, eaten raw, or added to preparations of peas or beans or stews.

The species name exscapa translates as ex = no, scape = stem.

Found along game trails and under piñons and junipers, the perennial Four O'Clock is a sprawling -- 2 feet high by 4 feet wide -- bushy plant with masses of inch-long magenta and purple flowers protruding from papery floral cups. The leaves are dark green, deltoid and thick.

With the advent of winter the aboveground Four O'Clock withers, only to re-emerge in the spring from its taproot.

The root, ground or powdered, has had many medicinal uses including for colic, eye infection, sore muscles, and an appetite suppressant, and the leaves have been used for smoking.

A pink-poppy-like flowered perennial found along roads and other disturbed lands. The leaves have star-shaped scratchy hairs. The fruits are edible widely consumed in ancient times.



A hair-growth stimulant, available in some commercial preparations. The pulp of the plant may be used to harden adobe floors or to dry as a cast for broken bones. In Santo Domingo boiled globe-mallow was added to gypsum for calcimine house paint.

S. angustifolia, Yerba del Negro, has narrow leaves. S. fendleri, Yerba de la Negrita, has lobed leaves.

Growing to a height of about 12 inches, the locoweed produces shoots of 10 to 40 purple to reddish-purple flowers that later give way to inch- long seed pods. The slightly fuzzy leaves are pinnately compound (having many leaflets along the leafstalk), with oblong inch-long leaflets. The habitat is open sandy slopes and piñon-juniper and oak zones.

Frijolillo, or "little bean" in Spanish, refers to the rattling seeds of the dry seedpod.

Locoweed is potentially hazardous or fatal to livestock, especially if the soil contains significant selenium, though local tradition says once the plant has gone to seed it is again safe for forage.

A foot-high common perennial with inch-long leaves, fuzzy on the underside, the Paintbrush is distinguished by its clusters of brilliant scarlet flowers, resembling a red paintbrush. Paintbrush thrives best in the company of grama grass, on the roots of which it is a parasite.

Known around Tesuque as Varas de San Jose.

There are no known pre-modern uses of this plant, but it is now used as a dye, a paint ingredient, a preservative, and soothing bath ingredient.

Fuzzy silver leaves below, this 6 to 8-inch tall yellow daisy is among the first spring bloomers. Grows well on rocky or poor soils.

The species name argentea translates as "silver", a reference to the leaves of this plant.

The plant to the left in the photograph of the Perky Sue is a Yucca glauca.

An annual herb that grows from early summer up to three feet high, the beeplant has leaves in threes on the sprig, puff-balls of four-petaled lavender flowers at the tips of its branches, and long narrow drooping fruits. The presence of beeplant is often an indicator of ruins or ancient farming plots.

Young beeplants, sometimes called wild spinach or Indian spinach, are cooked in repeated changes of water to rid it of its bitterness. Leaves from older plants may be cooked down to a thick dark paste, which is then sun-dried into edible cakes. The seeds may be dried and stored for winter use. The entire plant is ground, mixed with cornmeal, and baked in ashes to produce 'cleome cornbread'.

The sun-dried beeplant cakes are the source of the vegetal black pottery pigment known as guaco, which for more than a thousand years was used to decorate white- slipped ceramic pots. The same guaco was used as well to decorate baskets. Evidence of quantities of beeweed seeds and pollen at Anasazi sites indicate in the old days it was extremely widespread and very widely used.

This perennial primrose with 3-inch diameter white flowers likes dry, rocky or sandy, gravely, clay soils, and after a wet winter or spring it may appear on low flat areas in such great numbers that you might think someone threw an entire Kleenex™ box to the wind.


On closer inspection you will see a stemless rhizomatous plant [the seasonal stems grow from a perennial root] with a flower of four bi-lobed white petals and yellow stamens. This primrose is low to the ground -- it is not often more than 6 inches tall -- and it has 7-inch long jagged-edged oblanceolate (spear-point shaped, but with the point to the center and the wider part outward) leaves arrayed around the root (basal leaves) and flat to the ground.

During the spring the Tufted Evening Primrose may produce one to ten flowers daily, and the blooms fade to violet-pink as they wither the next morning or soon thereafter. The blooms are most dramatic in the evenings, when they are also the most fragrant.

The plant is pollinated by night-flying insects.

Low-growing Wright's verbena blooms in mid June, creating a carpet of purple-pink color for flat, sandy lands.

A weedy annual and one of the first to appear in spring, the tansy mustard, with finely dissected filigree-like leaves, may grow to three feet tall. The leaves on the younger plants have a dense fine hair giving them a gray color. Four-petaled small yellow flowers bloom profusely along the outside stems of the plant. The seedpods are thin and about a half-inch long.

Tansy mustard seeds and greens have been common food items from ancient times to present. The mix of Descurainia varieties in New Mexico today consists of some ancient species, some introduced from the Old World, and some crosses between them. The presence of tansy mustard is an indicator of heavy grazing and historic land use, particularly an indicator of 'melted' adobe.

Tansy mustard is famous as one of the two sources for Native American vegetal pottery paint that came into use in the early 1200s; the other is Rocky Mountain Beeplant. Tansy mustard was used more commonly for this purpose to the west of the Rio Grande. It is the iron in the mustard preparation rather than the carbon that makes the paint fire to black.