High hopes for the thornscrub
I’m excited to tend to Thornscrub like I would my own yard (I hesitate to use the word “garden”, it sounds vanilla as hell and too safe, manicured and wholesome). Thornscrub will have elements of the living world that I could never have in my own little yard, which still has to exist on a grid of city blocks where it stands as a lonely oasis surrounded by a desert of lawn and asphalt, a stark visual portrayal especially when seen above from a drone). I’m excited to make rounds around Thornscrub the same way that I do my own yard and garden, noticing individual plants and saying hello to them like they’re friends, noticing where the orb weavers are setting up, how populations of various insects are doing, where the tortoises live, when the cicadas come out, where the indigo snakes like to lurk. I’m excited to have good friends to do this with, to make these rounds with, to talk about the biological going-ons that occur there. I’m excited to provide a refuge for all the things that I love, safe from the rampant destruction going on in the human world outside, where acres of habitat continue to be cleared without any respect or awareness for the living world that exists there.
Making the rounds to check on the life that we are protecting, observing and noting changes in the seasonality and habits of the plants and animals that live there…these are the kinds of things that I enjoy doing in my own little 1/8th of an acre at home. I enjoy checking on the leafcutter ants and the spiny lizard that’s as fat as a hamburger. I always hope I run into a gulf coast toad hiding amongst my plant pots and soil bins. I softly chuckle watching the anoles wake up and bail from the potted plants that they’re resting in when I move them. I like knowing that the chirping frogs are still hanging around. I was ecstatic when a tarantula showed up near my front stoop one day. Thinking about these things makes me wonder what it will feel like to be the same way not just about 1/8 of an acre, but about 145 acres. The same way that I am able to tend to and create places that foster life around my own yard, I will tend to and foster life around our 145 acres of intact peyote gardens and Thornscrub habitat, doing everything that I can to enable it to thrive : shooting pigs, monitoring habitat, fencing around soil crusts, putting water out for wildlife.
Misguided Efforts By some Native AMerican Groups to “Protect” Peyote will only further endanger it.
Peyote has the misfortune of growing in an area of the country where an infinitesimally small portion of the dominant culture have any respect, awareness or reverence for the native plants and native plant habitat. Peyote grows in a place where the dominant culture puts a higher value on cleared land than land with "brush" on it. Every year here countless acres of peyote habitat with hundreds of plants on them in Starr, Webb, Zapata and Jim Hogg County get bulldozed and cleared for agriculture, suburban housing, and cattle pasture (y’know, to graze cattle in what is effectively a desert). Meanwhile many native groups are claiming that it's poaching by non-natives that's driving peyote populations down, a notion which is completely absurd. Even more absurd is that some of these native groups want to weaponize racist drug laws that were created to persecute the native groups themselves in order to “protect” Lophophora williamsii - Peyote. They are asking the government to prosecute anybody growing or possessing peyote that doesn't have a tribal card. They want to prevent peyote from being decriminalized. Meanwhile, if peyote were decriminalized, it would be significantly easier to ease poaching pressures as well as restore Peyote populations by any conservation groups hoping to re-planting thousands of them into protected parcels of habitat. The fact that anyone would be against decriminalizing what is essentially a harmless plant that is on the verge of being wiped out from over 50% of its former habitat is insane.
Yet many native groups that value peyote as medicine and sacrament are still wasting valuable time and energy chasing a bogeyman that barely exists : psychedelic “entrepreneurs” and anglo peyote users that are supposedly jumping at the gills, lying in wait for peyote to be decriminalized so they can illegally trespass on private property in a state where nearly everyone who lives in rural areas is armed — just to be able to try eating a plant that causes severe stomach discomfort and potential vomitting in order to experience a high. Many native groups are wasting time chasing new age “honky shamans” (which yes, do exist, and are as ridiculous as they sound), while the real villain of habitat destruction, invasive species, a culture that has no respect for the native habitat whatsoever, and feral pigs (yes, they uproot and partially eat peyote) are destroying peyote plants on an exponential scale.
Crying bloody murder about non-natives supposedly demanding access to Peyote (a phenomenon I rarely see) while tens of thousands of plants and their habitat are lost every year to the kind of things pictured in the photographs below is a tragic and wasteful misplacing of grievance and culpability. Further, these native groups waste ample time begging the DEA to enforce existing drugs laws - drug laws that were themselves products of a racist culture war — demanding that a huge segment of the population not have access just to grow a plant that is legal in Canada and most of Europe. In both of those countries where peyote is legal to grow but illegal to ingest, there is not now nor ever has been a huge demand for this cactus in the drug trade or in psychedelic culture. Most people just don’t care or have the time to play psychonaut, not surprisingly. Further, anglo use of peyote can easily be discouraged via cultural encouragement alone without weaponizing absurd, failed drug laws. Salvia apiana, a plant held sacred by many Native Americans of the American Southwest, was at one point experiencing poaching pressures in California and Arizona from anglos due to the aromatic smell it produces when burned or smudged, but through cultural education and awareness, its poaching was discouraged, mostly through social media. Poaching pressures on this plant have now eased. Like peyote, Salvia apiana can be grown from seed, and dried bundles of leaves sold in overpriced health food stores now often come only from sources that have guaranteed that the leaves they sell come from plants that were grown sustainably, on farms. Further, the mere use of the plant by anglos has in many places been discouraged as a form of cultural appropriation. The same could easily be done with peyote. Poaching pressures and inappropriate use could be easily controlled for were Peyote ever legalized for horticultural production.
Instead of petitioning lawmakers to throw old ladies in jail for growing cacti that contain bitter but harmless alkaloids, these Native groups might be better off spending their energy lobbying to protect habitat, or for the right to grow it themselves and plant it out into "the gardens" of South Texas where it (and the dozen other rare cactus species it grows with) are currently being destroyed on an almost daily basis. Native groups could instead be buying up parcels of land with Peyote on it and learning to protect and steward the Thornscrub habitat that it grows on instead of fixating so hard on identity politics, and using archaic draconian drug laws that were originally created to persecute natives themselves. Peyote will also grow well in the ground in places like Southern Arizona. I have seen firsthand large colonies planted on O’odham reservations 30 years ago that today are thriving, an excellent form of in-situ conservation. Yet few people, if any, are doing this. Why?
I understand that as humans, the herd mentality among us is strong and it's easy to just go along with what others are doing. I also understand that finger-pointing is a much easier temptation than actually working hard to find a solution to a complex and tragic problem. I implore some of the native groups that today stand against decriminalizing or legalizing peyote cultivation to either begin to focus on restoration work, ex-situ conservation (conserving species outside of their native habitat) and habitat protection, or to start advocating for conservation groups to legally be able to work with this plant species in order to protect it, conserve it, and partially restore what has been lost. For too long native groups have said “the peyote will take care of itself”. As somebody who lives in the peyote gardens and is familiar with the habitat and all the species that grow here, I have seen firsthand that that is simply not true.
“Chaining” is a method by which a large ship-chain is dragged between two bulldozers to clear huge swaths of land of shrub and small-tree cover at once. It is commonly employed in the great basin, namely in Nevada and Idaho, but I saw it being done here in South Texas in the peyote gardens in March of 2023.
A Brilliant Strategy exemplified by a Neotropical Legume
Ice cream bean (Inga edulis) volunteers all over disturbed areas in the neotropics. It's a common snack, ready-to-wear and sold in markets, but the seeds are not tasty, only the pulp around them is, so they are discarded on road sides, where they germinate and then become trees. A very adaptive strategy for a plant, using humans to disperse its seeds.
It can be a hard one to grow in the wrong climate. It requires temps between 65-85° F (18-29 C) and ample humidity. I tried to grow it in South Texas, and it struggled for a year before dying, either from arid heat or prolonged chill during the month or two of temps below 50° F
A Strange Pollination Syndrome in Ecuador...
This Orchid species depends on a single species of pollinator for its pollination. What's more, it doesn't actually offer the pollinator any reward, but instead deceives the pollinator into visiting the flower by pretending to be the pollinators prey.
Phragmipedium pearcei tricks female hover flies (in the species Ocyptanthes antiphales) into visiting the flowers by producing spots on the inside of the flower's "pouch" that mimic aphids. This species of hover fly lays eggs in aphid colonies, and later the emerging larvae eat the aphids as they grow.
It's also quite likely that this flower produces pheromones that mimic the alert pheromones of aphids in order to help attract the hover flies - quite a few other orchid genera do this is as well, such as #Epipactis.
The hover fly flies into the "pouch" formed by the labellum petal and is temporarily trapped. When it finally escapes the flower, it is forced to exit through the top of the flower by the "moustache" structure on the staminode, where it then comes into contact with the stigma (the female part of the flower) and later the anther.
This "trap-and-release" pollination method is also used by plants such as the pipevines (genus Aristolochia), with which it seems to work pretty well.
The genus Phragmipedium is 1 of 5 genera in the orchid subfamily Cypripedioideae, known for producing two anthers instead of the standard one as well as the "slipper" or "pouch" shaped labellum (see last photo for picture of Orchid phylogeny and subfamilies).
Screenshot of pollinator taken from "Pollination of slipper orchids (cypripedioideae): A review" (Pemberton, 2013).
A Plantation Is Not a Forest
The amount of Radiata Pine and Eucalyptus Plantation that was planted in the 1970s and 80s due to a law that subsidized and encouraged private companies to destroy native forest and plant exotics is mind-boggling here in Chile.
While driving in between the few crumbs of protected habitat we have seen oceans, mile after mile, of planted non-native forest where there once was Nothofagus (the Southern beeches), Myrtle and Araucaria forest. The amount of destruction is excessive, and what has been lost is discouraging.
What leaves me hopeful, however, is seeing a burgeoning enthusiasm and reverence for native plants in Chilean culture and among young people here. Art featuring natives is common, and many here seem to embrace the rare plants which compose these special Southern Hemisphere forests and plant communities.
Ode to a rare Mustard
Thelypodiopsis shinnersii (syn. Mostacillastrum vaseyi) is a rare annual mustard that's seemingly much more rare than previously thought, most likely due to the same old culprits of habitat destruction and invasive grasses.
It was put on my radar by a friend who spotted it growing in Harlingen, Texas and couldn't figure out what it was. I don't know of many native Brassicas in the region either, and the ones I do know certainly were not this. I looked on SEINET and found only a few herbarium specimens, and when I got to the area - A disturbed patch of vegetation with Borrichia frutescens on the edge of an Ebony woodland I searched the area and couldn't find more than 20 plants.
Though I was pretty sure of the ID I still decided to consult Brassicaceae Expert Dr. Ihsan Al-Shabahz for ID confirmation, which came back positive. Nursery owner Mike Heep was familiar with the species, of course, and knew of a roadside patch North of Harlingen around here : 26.194051,-97.611724 but I found the place overgrown with the same invasive grasses and wasn't able to locate any individuals.
Regardless, it's a cool species with glaucous blue sessile leaves with an auriculate base and tiny white flowers, and it likely doesn't go too far inland as it doesn't seem adapted for drought, preferring instead to stick near Arroyos and waterways.
Feral Hogs Represent An Immediate Threat to Peyote
As if this species didn't already have enough threats facing it, now Peyote (Lophophora williamsii) can add feral hogs to the list of immediate threats to its existence. It seems the threat from hogs is much more extensive than thought.
Peyote, of course, is sacred to Native Americans who use it as a religious sacrament during all-night teepee ceremonies. It has been an important part of resisting the effects of colonization and genocide for indigenous people in North America, but it is curr facing some pretty severe threats, the most of which seems to be land clearance and an innate societal disrespect for the kind of habitat that Peyote grows in in South Texas: Tamaulipan Thornscrub.
When licensed Peyote dealers known as "Peyoteros" harvest Peyote, they merely cut it above its underground stem, leaving the stem intact so that dormant buds can re-sprout new "heads" (stems). When feral pigs eat Peyote, exploiting its water stores but apparently unbothered by the bitter alkaloids, they dig up the plants and leave them half-eaten to die slowly on the soil surface. The pigs also damage Peyote's nurse plants like Guajillo (Senegalia berlandieri) by chewing on the roots, causing it to die. These nurse plants are of immense importance not just to Peyote but to the entire ecosystem, since they mitigate the effects of the brutal summer heat and dry season, while also fixing nitrogen through their roots and making it available to other plants in the soil. Remove the nurse plants, and many of the cacti in this habitat will not have the shade necessary to make it through the summer.
What's really tragic to think about is the effects feral hogs will have on the long-term health of the habitat here. I'm hopeful we can eventually use PigBrig corral traps to get our problem under control, but what about the hundreds of other properties where habitat is being destroyed but the landowners are not paying attention and don't even care? This is how a species slowly gets wiped out from an area, which is something I've seen happen firsthand with other cactus species in South Texas. Suddenly, they're just not there anymore, and few seem to notice or remember.
How Peyote Recovers from SunBurn
This was exciting to see, and illustrates how the epicuticular wax that reflects ultraviolet light and prevents "sunburn", especially at high temperatures when ultraviolet is the most damaging, can be regenerated directly by the epidermal tissue itself, and DOESN'T require new growth of epidermal tissue directly from the apical meristem itself.
The apical meristem is the point in the center and top of any cactus stem where new growth is generated. Cacti also have the potential of producing secondary growth in their cambium, but these lateral meristems (which eudicots have but monocots lack) can't generate new epidermis, they can only produce cork cells, a kind of protective secondary growth which is dead at maturity.
These plants originally got sunburned because we removed the invasive buffelgrass which was shading them out. Had we not done so, they would have eventually etiolated and effectively died of starvation. Since they had already been growing in shade for so long, they did not possess the "epicuticular wax" that gives peyote its blue color. Lacking this wax, they burned quickly within a day of exposure to the hot sun, but owing to peyote's excessive amount of storage tissue located in its underground stem, they recovered in only a few months. This illustrates how quickly Peyote - and many other cacti - can heal itself, and this underground stem is what makes the cutting of Peyote by members of the Native American church completely sustainable *when done correctly* and at appropriately spaced intervals. It's also what makes poaching and digging this plant such an unnecessary *completely DICK* move, as this is equivalent to stealing from the other life forms that depend on this plant and looting habitat of its biological richness.
My only regret is that we did not come back to check on these plants sooner so that we could accurately measure how quick they recovered.
South Texas' Rarest Brassica
Thelypodiopsis shinnersii was a plant that I'd never heard of until a couple weeks ago, when I read somewhere that it was a little-known mustard that only occurs in a few places in South Texas near Harlingen. There are reportedly a few populations in Tamaulipas, too. Anytime a plant is rare or in this case, imperiled, it warrants attention as to why. In the case of this tiny annual brassica, the reason is probably an inability to compete with the massive amount of invasive weeds that have taken up space in its former habitat, among other factors.
The plant habitat of South Texas is among some of the most disrespected and unappreciated of anywhere I've been, and the dominant culture here is immediately hostile to the native landscape, usually unable to see the beauty or wonder in the dense scrub of cacti and multi-stemmed shrubs that compose the thorn scrub and thorn forest. It's not surprising to me to see plants like this one that are on the verge of extinction.
Thelypodiopsis shinnersii, or Mostacillastrum vaseyi, as Al-Shabahz (the brassica expert) re-named it, doesn't grow in thorn forest. Instead, it grows on the margins of wet areas, where I saw it growing with another plant that's find of wet, salty areas : Borrichia frutescens.
The population here was so tiny that I didn't feel it right to take an herbarium voucher, especially since it wasn't even in flower (it flowers in March). I briefly surveyed up and down the trail next to the arroyo, but most all of the surrounding land was covered in invasive Guinea grass.
It's easy to distinguish from other plants due to its sessile, auriculate leaf bases, and when in flower, small white 4-petaled flowers
Live Laugh Love, or "Holden Caulfield with a Touch of Vandalism"
Why do we plant things? Why do we grope plants, collect seeds, take so many pictures of flowers? Why do we study botany? Because it gives us dopamine, keeps us from committing acts that would probably put us in jail. Helps keep the puke down. Money doesn't give me dopamine. I like having enough to be comfortable but if I'm not creating or growing something than I'm just consuming something like a miserable sap. I don't want fancy cars and expensive clothes and anybody who would be impressed by that kind of shit is the kind of person I don't want within six degrees of separation of me because their values are poisoned and they're probably a boring fucking sucker.
People who worship money bore me. Buying "stuff" bores me. Consuming is the opposite of creating. Fixation on frivolous status symbols and luxury items is the opposite of mental exercise or learning. That "shiny shit" rots our primate brains. None of us are immune. I look down on people who want it as if they're an even more semi-conscious animal than the rest of us monkeys. Unenlightened half-wits with little else to offer. I know that makes me sound like an elitist cunt and I'm fine with that. I also usually wear the same pants three days in a row. I find these fools with plucked eyebrows, shit-eating grins and waxed faces on the billboards utterly revolting. No blood in those veins. Lowest common denominator motives. Maybe they could have more to offer if they tried to, if they read a book or dropped some acid or hiked a hundred miles into the mountains, or even just sat around a fire in the middle of nowhere beneath a starry sky laughing their asses off and lighting their farts on fire but right now they're a boring unimaginative money-worshipping twat and I have no use for them. Finance and business, investment portfolios, helping clients win big settlements. Phony smiles, small talk, constant salespeople. They're part of the reason the world is dying, scram. I swallow my tragedy with a tall glass of dark humor, and these days it's all tragic.
Why You Can't Easily "Move" Woody Plants: It's in the Roots
So often I hear people making the assumption that small trees and shrubs and other woody plants can easily be "moved", but in most cases this is a pipe dream and destined to fail.
Why digging up and moving trees and shrubs often doesn't work :
The only parts of the roots that are engaged in absorption of water and nutrients are the distal few inches of the root, where the root hairs are (the part of the illustration circled in red), but root hairs are somewhat short-lived and don't last long as they are continuously replaced as the root grows.
As the roots continue to grow and elongate, root hairs die and are not replaced at the same site the way that branches are, which may resprout from dormant buds on the stem or shoot. Root hairs are only produced at the root apical meristems on tap roots and lateral roots, the rest of the root above that is only plumbing and transport, not absorption, though lateral roots and secondary roots can also have growing tips which produce root hairs.
When you dig up a plant, you are mostly severing those distal (as opposed to proximal) root segments that contain the root hairs, which mean that the plant now has no way of absorbing water and must regrow new roots. This is the main reason why "moving" plants so often fails. The only way to ensure that you do not sever the parts of the root that contain the root hair when moving something like a small tree is to make sure that you basically remove the entire crater of soil that the tree is growing in, which usually necessitates the use of a tree spade mounted on a small dozer.
If you ARE able to get a decent amount of roots with root hairs when digging a plant, be aware that sometimes the best way to ensure success is to sever some of the shoot up top, maintaining an adequate root-to-shoot ratio and preventing evapotranspiration of moisture from leaves.
Growing the Texas/Mexican Madrone
People say that Texas Madrones are hard to cultivate. Indeed they can be, but it is certainly not impossible. In Alpine Texas I have seen multiple large, beautiful specimens in people's yards. They are always growing in protected locations however, like the north or east side of a house, were they won't get cooked in the hot summer afternoons. This makes sense when you keep in mind that the few places that they can be found in Brewster and Pecos County, for instance are relictual habitats like narrow washes and canyons, protected from the hot afternoon sun.
No doubt like many of the members of subfamily Arbutoideae (of the blueberry family, Ericaceae), They harbor specific kinds of mycorrhizal fungi and they have the root morphology to do it, consisting mostly of many fine fibrous root hairs that provide ample surface area for the fungi to colonize. That said the exact species of fungi have most likely not been genetically sequenced or analyzed, which is yet another tragedy of how understudied so many aspects of Texas botany and ecology are.
Dr Michael Powell at Sul Ross University states that the limiting factor is for the most part the very narrow window of water that they require when young. It is very easy to let them dry out And it is very easy to overwater them to the point that they easily rot. The trick is keeping the soil moisture level within the boundaries of that fine window in between two wet and too dry. Others have stated that products like root shield can inoculate them with the fungi they need, but others state that it is not necessary. Depending on how hot and dry the climate is, they are probably best with morning sun and shade in the hot afternoon. They do like water when they are old, but they do not like swampy soil.
At the University they are grown in narrow tree tubes. With a large volume of fast training soil it seems safer to prevent them drying out while also preventing them rotting. The fast drainage prevents rot in the larger soil volume prevents drying out quickly. Perhaps a mixture of half organic substrate mixed with a quarter pumice and a quarter pine or cedar bark chips (which are organic but also resistant to fungal attack) would be the key. Vermiculite might also help since it holds moisture but is not easily eaten by fungi. Keep in mind that most pathogenic fungi get their start eating organic matter that is already dead and decaying and then gain enough strength to attack living tissue, like the roots of the madrone. If the roots are inoculated with the beneficial mycorrhizae, then attack by pathogenic fungi is probably less likely, since mycorrhizae have been known to “ward off” pathogenic fungi in various settings. This makes sense, since there is a self-interest on the part of the fungi in protecting its own food source (forgive the anthropomorphizing, lol It just helps in an explanatory sense).
Whatever the specific code is to growing madrones, It is important to keep trying. This is such a great and beneficial plant for pollinators and wildlife and should be revered in Texas horticulture as many wild plants continue to succumb to drought and a changing climate.
Things to remember when growing Arbutus xalapensis:
Avoid root disturbance at all costs. If you grow a few seedlings together in the same pot keep in mind you cannot separate them at any stage during their later growth. Just let them grow together and accept that if you might die or they might all grow together to form a single tree. It's not worth disturbing the roots and breaking those fine sensitive root hairs.
Protect young trees from deer. If a tree is damaged when it is young, it will resprout leaves but the leaves will likely wither and die. No one really knows why this happens but they do not recover from deer browsing when young. It is worth culling deer when possible unless you have the help of a local mountain lion.
The most important thing to consider when growing Madrones is to keep the soil in that fine and narrow window between too much moisture and too little. Do not water them unless you have picked up the pot and felt how heavy it is, since The weight of the pot changes according to how much water is in the soil. Sometimes you can eye the top of the soil level too but that will only give you an idea of the top inch of moisture content, when it is the roots that are most affected by overwatering or underwatering.
All photos and auto-correct typos my own.
Why “NATIVE” Plants?
What do we mean by "plant native" and why? What is a "native plant"
I focus on learning what's native no matter where I go because there is a very important context there to be had, and it gives us a much broader perspective on the ecosystem and living fabric of which we are all a part.
What is a native plant? A native plant is a plant that existed in a place before humans were able to transport plant species across the globe by the thousands, haphazardly mixing key elements of ecosystems that prior to had been separated for millions of years by oceans, the equator, and the polar zones.
When you see a native plant, you are looking at the original living skin of the Earth in that place. You are seeing the green living skin of the Earth that is specific to that place : it exists there and specifically looks and behaves (flowering time, interactions with pollinators, dispersers, etc) the way that it does as a result of literally millions of years of natural selection and evolution in THAT SPECIFIC PLACE. That environment, that landscape, that geology, that climate, those native herbivores, those native pollinators - those are just a few of the factors that selected for and essentially bred that plant to be what it is today.
As humans mindlessly continue to dismantle the biosphere - an act that is similar to cracking open the hood of a Chevy and just beginning to whimsically rip out tubes, rotors, belts, and gaskets like a happy-go-lucky moron without even trying to figure out what those pieces do - the vast majority of us in our ignorance lack any context for which the living fabric around us evolved. This is easy for us to do because most of it has been destroyed and we have so thoroughly been disconnected from the land and worldwide biosphere of species that supports us. We are tinkering with a giant Jenga Tower, removing important blocks that are essential to holding up the tower because we selfishly assume that because those wood blocks don't observably directly benefit us that they can be disposed of. We behave this way because we LACK CONTEXT.
Native plants are this context. The plants that are native in a place are the result of having evolved there. They are the result of traits that have been selected for by the environment itself : by the climate, the herbivores that exist in that region, the specific suite of pollinators that exist in that region, the geology. In this way, we can see that quite literally, everything in an ecosystem is connected.
We lack context for how the land around us functions, for how the life that lives on it interacts, what the relationships between those native organisms are - the fungi, insects, birds, mammals, reptiles, and plants. This biological machine, this ecosystem, worked fine before this civilization that we now live under began to tinker with it. It worked fine because it was the result of millions of years of evolution (specifically, of co-evolution). The same way that a species can evolve and change throughout time, so can a large ecosystem. A species of plant or animal is just the smallest unit of an ecosystem or bioregion. When we zoom out both spatially and temporally - when we think beyond our own short human lifespans - we can begin to see how the ecosystem functions in keeping the land and all the organisms within it healthy. If the ecosystem somehow couldn't keep the land and the smaller units which comprise it healthy, these organisms would begin to blink out and go extinct - a phenomenon that we are seeing right now. The more species that begin to drop off, and soon enough the phenomenon becomes a cascade. Remove enough blocks from the Jenga tower and it will eventually collapse.
Our entire civilization is disconnected from the life and the land that surround us, despite how much it nurtures and supports us, despite how much it makes our lives and existence so much more pleasant and bearable. Our entire concept of what plants are and what purpose they should serve around us is tainted. We think plant species should only be planted to "look pretty" (whatever that means) or feed us, not realizing that all plants are responsible for sustaining us. We think the plants that exist on the landscapes that we surround ourselves with should be the garbage that we purchase out of bgi box stores like Home Despot or Lowe's - the overbred, greenhouse-hybridized descendants of plants that evolved 5,000 miles away in places and regions that in no way resemble that ones that we live in. We don't even know what's "natural" anymore. We have normalized the abnormal. We don't understand how the living world around us functions, and we have no clue how we even fit into it. We are lost. This is the fundamental tragedy of the modern day.
The living web that we are a part of nurtures us, keeps us sane, cleans our air, mitigates the effects of our heat waves and our floods, creates the pleasant smells we smell at night when we walk next to a field of photosynthetic, respiring organisms.
We are philosophically disconnected from this world. We made the mistake of thinking that severing our connection to it was a good idea simply because - due to the intellectual minority among us - we gained the technology to do so. Rather than stay united with the living world and using our technology to nurture our relationship with it, we have abandoned that living world altogether. We lack all context for it. Native Plants are the foundation of that context. Native Plants are how we lead our asses out of these lonely dark ages that we have put ourselves into as a species. Plant the Native Plants and everything else positive will follow.
One of Texas' Rarest Plants - Paronychia congesta
I recently got a chance to visit one of Texas's rarest plants, which not surprisingly gross on a unique soil formation that appears to be pure caliche. This plant has only been collected from two different sites and I believe it has only been collected twice. It recently received endangered species status.
The genus Paronychia has quite a few species, most of them occurring on dry sites or in dry regions. Paronychia jamesii is a more common species throughout much of Texas, built as it is to tolerate heat and drought. Paronychia congesta, however, seems uniquely adapted to tolerate the brutal heat of South Texas. All species in this genus are generally smaller plants and tend to be somewhat matted. P. congesta has very abbreviated leaves with short-to-nonexistent internodes, the branches and leaves covered in hairs and scales which no doubt greatly benefit it and prevent it from transpiring moisture while at the same time reflecting heat and light.
It was co-occurring with Euploca torreyi, Liatris punctata var mexicana, Stenaria nigricans, Calliandra conferta and Nahuatlea hypoleuca on these harsh caliche exposures. Caliche is basically a natural cement formed by the dissolution and subsequent precipitation of the minerals weathered out of calcareous country rock.
Thornscrub Por Vida
For those of us who are advocating for more native plants in landscapes here in the Rio Grande Valley I think it's important to point out that what has collectively been referred to as "brush" or Thornscrub here (what might be called "chaparral" in California or "matorral" in Chile) IS the kind of habitat type that occurred here and which lived here for many tens of thousands of years before Europeans and even humans in general came here.
Yet there seems to be this subconscious distaste for "brush" within the mainstream culture of the Rio Grande Valley and much of South Texas, where "brush" was often something to be feared because it's where snakes lived and the plants could poke you. I see a similar fear or ignorance of the native habitat in many places around the world.
Rather than understanding and appreciating the native living skin of the Earth at this latitude and longitude - at this particular unique place on the North American continent - the "brush" is usually seen as something that stands in the way of development or agriculture (nevermind the fact that it harbors life and literally acts like nature's swamp cooler by evapotranspirative cooling).
Instead of appreciating and nurturing the plant species that form these habitats, many local gardens historically have tried to mimic traditional European gardens by blending mowed turf grass (which makes no sense whatsoever in this climate) with orange dyed wood chips and landscape beds hedged into topiary shapes.
Changing this paradigm and outlook - which one could argue is immediately hostile to the surrounding native ecosystem - and getting people to appreciate the Thornscrub and brush is key to creating a healthy and liveable landscape in the RGV.
As someone who learned botany in deserts, I've always been attracted to spiny plants. They are often the coolest examples of what can evolve under the intense natural selection of hot seasonally-dry environments. I first came to the Rio Grande Valley in 2014 SOLELY TO SEE THE PLANTS HERE : many of these species don't grow anywhere else in the United States.
I think pointing out to people - city hall especially - that "brush" or Thornscrub is the only thing that makes sense here. It is what evolved here and nourished the many animals that live here and which make the RGV a destination for winter Texans, birders, and "ecotourists". You plant a few of the native shrub species and you get a pair of electric hedgers to give it a "haircut" every once in a while. Trying to have a lawn at a subtropical latitude in a place where rain is sporadic and temperatures remain at 100° for 8 months straight is absolutely INSANE.
Plants define a place and a region like nothing else does. We need to encourage people to stop pretending that they live in a villa in Tuscany or a palm-tree-candyland in Fiji. We live in a place with Ebanos, Mesquites, Retama and Coma trees, with tough plants that take getting blasted with hot sun and surviving months without a drop of rain and still feed our rare birds, butterflies and insects. They are beautiful and they deserve to be respected rather than bulldozed or called "weeds" by people in suits who can't name even 3 of the native plants that lived on the land they grew up on for centuries before they were born.
We need to teach people to love the Thornscrub.
Society is garbage, “Nature” is Sacred.
Aldo Leopold wrote “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” I would expound on that to say that being alive in the world in most places today as one who has a relationship with non-human things means living embedded in a society that is innately disconnected from anything real.
I’ve heard so much obnoxious and rhetorical talk throughout the years about “spirituality” from an endless parade of charlatans. It was always hard to swallow because the people who pronounced it rarely ever lived it, and to speak of spirituality if one has never actually done the work to look inside themselves with humility and be honest in the way about their own fears and failures, the way that - for example - alcoholics and addicts in recovery do seems phony at best and outright dangerously dishonest at worst.
At some point along this weird winding road I’ve been on, being fixated with plant life and the things that interact with them - after nights seeing sunsets and feeling rockfaces in my hands and winds on my forehead - I had to admit that there was something more to what I was doing then just obsessive fixation. My relationship with plants and the entire living world outside of humanity became spiritual, and at the same time I moved to a place where the subconscious ethos of the dominant society was inherently pitted against everything I believed in and cared about.
Texas is not kind or tolerant of the living biological fabric that coats the Earth within the make-believe geopolitical boundaries of the state. The doctrines of the silly dominant religion are probably one reason. Christianity is not alone in its mindless disregard and enabling of an Anthropocentric worldview. None of the Abrahamic religions display any large degree of tolerance, awareness or stewardship to Earth’s biosphere, where as most of them believe it to be a disposable by-product or background scenery to what’s really important - the test of faith and behavior that is a human lifespan, all of it one big opportunity to see how much humans can live up to “His” expectations and rules. The biological skin of the Earth is only there for us to exploit and use during our time here.
It is common among progressives today to fetishize anything “indigenous” without talking about the ideologies and connections to the life around them that some indigenous cultures exuded. There is often no mention of the animism or beliefs of some indigenous cultures and groups that made them worth noting in comparison to the present day or what could be learned from them, only a focus on racial identity - outside of a context for racial history and oppression, this is merely another metric with which human social groups - as social primates - have used to self-segregate and divide.
I don’t think it’s preposterous to say that my sense of spirituality, my religion, is the plant life that surrounds me. That is why I nurture it. My religion is the cicadas that sing in the trees at dusk. That is why I smile and thank them. My religion is the rock dust that blows into my teeth on windy days in the desert. That is why I might laugh at how much it sucks, but I don’t complain. It is my belief that I - and no other human - is of no greater importance than any other element of the biosphere, and that if we take from the system that we are inseparably tied to, we must equate by giving something back. I hate lawns because they inherently deny all of this. I hate strip malls because they reduce the human experience to a transaction. I hate all-american sprawl and vehicle culture because it traps us in cars that isolate us from each other and from the world. And though I love people as individuals, I’m only being somewhat hyperbolic when I say that I hate society as it stands today because existing within it is generally insufferable, smothering, isolating, alienating, deadening, numbing and often times rooted in values and ideologies that I equate with vacuous, mind-numbing garbage.
Only a moron...
"Only an unthinking, naive and semi-conscious moron would ridicule the idea that the plants that we surround ourselves with matter. We can humanize our landscapes or we can create bleak, soul-crushing shitholes that make us want to escape our own environments with pills, porn, booze, or other forms of escapism. Like rats in the famous “Rat Park Experiment” conducted by Psychologist Bruce Alexander in the 1970s, when our lives feel meaningless, empty and devoid of a feeling of place or belonging, we self-medicate. Who can blame us. Likewise, when humans are removed from the living world that birthed us into being, we search for other facets of existence to cling to and use to fill the void that's been created within us.
Having a relationship with the living world around us makes us feel complete. It’s not everything - it’s not going to cure cancer or end our stupid religious wars - but it willi undoubtedly take our collective human angst down a few notches.
Creating a living tapestry of (mostly native) plant life around us feeds into our dopamine and serotonin receptors. Our lives, our cultures and our collective intellect as humans thrives in places that nurture us, in places that are alive."
Barry Dopawoski, Insurance Agent and Claims Adjuster, Elmwood Park, Illinois
The Giving Tree
My Version of Shel Silverstein's Epic Children's Book "The Giving Tree", revised for the Anthropocene and the age of Mass Extinction ™️ & Biosphere Collapse
Camouflaged Cacti in Central Mexico
How does a plant "know" what a rock looks like? It doesn't. Instead, its surrounding environment*selects* for it over gradually over lengths of time that far surpass a human lifetime (and far surpass human civilization itself).
There are any multitude of shapes and forms that the evolutionary lineage that produced Ariocarpus kotschoubeyanus could have taken, but since it evolved on slightly-metamorphosed calcium carbonate rock that fractures as it weathers here at 6,600 ft elevation, the tubercles on this plant (which is basically just a flattened stem, like a cylinder that's been smooshed in a vice) resemble the rocks.
In arid regions there is a lot more herbivore pressure on plants than there is in more mesic ones since there is much less on the menu. As a result any individual plant whose phenotype made it easier to spot got picked off.
We have seen the same thing happen most recently with the lily species Fritillaria delavayi in China, which has been subjected to increasingly more intense harvesting pressure by humans who pick it to sell in market as medicine. As a result, Fritillaria delavayi has survived by become much harder to spot in its rocky environment - measurably so, to the point that there was a paper published on it. Such is a prime example of natural selection at work in real time.
I've seen the same thing with pyramidalis in South Africa.
The genus Ariocarpus contains 8 or 9 species depending on which taxonomy you accept. All resemble rocks, indicating that the adaptive benefits of mimicking them have been in this lineage for quite
some time.
Silver Ferns on Marble Mountains at 10,500'
Among the genus of fern Astrolepis - which is renowned for growing primarily in desert mountains and often out of cracks in bare rock - there are only a handful of species. This species is Astrolepis integerrima, distinguished from other species in the genus by the dense coat of scales and trichomes on its upper (adaxial) leaf surface.
And among the different populations of Astrolepis integerrima that exist throughout arid regions of North America, there are various ecotypes - that is populations of the same species that all vary slightly morphologically and genetically, but not quite enough to be considered separate species or even subspecies. Their differing characteristics and morphology is the result of their particular geography and geology and climate patterns having slowly "sculpted" them - evolutionarily speaking - over the last however thousand to tens of thousands to perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. A prime example of natural selection at work.
And THIS particular ecotype of Astrolepis integerrima was more stunning than any I have ever encountered, especially since it was seemingly everywhere on this mountaintop at 10,500' (3200 m) that was composed entirely of MARBLE. That is, metamorphosed limestone. It was growing next to giant Agaves (salmiana ssp. crassispina), oaks (Quercus crassifolia), and even a cool carnivorous plant (Pinguicula moranensis).
The new growth and emerging leaf blades almost resembled feathers that were slowly uncoiling, so dense were the scales and trichomes on the blade that you could barely see any photosynthetic tissue through it. Hairs of course are an adaptation to many things, primarily drying out, full sun and frost. Surely, in the high mountains of Mexico all three of those factors made for this particular ecotype of this extremely fuzzy, silver fern.