Homage to the Thornscrub & the Mesquital
I used to go to sleep thinking about California serpentine barrens, but now I spend my time obsessing over the mysteries of Tamaulipan Thornscrub - a landscape that’s a pain in the ass to hike through in a climate that’s deadly to get caught slipping in (ie not wearing a big hat that protects you from the sun, not wearing boots to protect you from the thorns and cacti, and not being dressed right for the 105 degree temps).
I must’ve planted 40 different species from this underappreciated ecosystem today at a project we’re working on in South Texas. 40 species and 80 plants in total (at least) planted in the July heat in South Texas. Get a big straw hat with a chin strap to keep it on your head in the wind and some good boots. Take a 7 hour break at noon and start again at 7 pm when the sun is sinking in the sky. Carry on until 11.
Once it’s dark, the glass eyes of dozens of wolf spiders reflect the light of my headlamp back at me. They’ve apparently been feasting well on the pill bugs that live beneath the St. Augustine Grass I just destroyed using a sodcutter I rented from the Home Despot (It really is a shitty model. I’ve used plenty of sodcutters at this point in my life and I’ve killed quite a few lawns, and this shit brand (Classen was the brand, I believe) from Home Depot is the only model I’ve come across that doesn’t have a reverse so you can back yourself out of corners. And the blade adjustment gets jammed. Also, Home Depot sucks. But it got the job done.).
This particular project was especially cool because it is essentially a blank canvas. There was NOTHING on this lot besides the house except for a half-dead oak tree the former owner planted and the St. Augustine grass (Stenotaphrum secundatum), which is a much easier kill than the dreaded Bermuda Grass.
I’ve quickly filled this lot up with dozens of my favorite thornscrub plants. I found a Rabdotus shell buried a foot beneath the soil level. Rabdotus are thornscrub snails and a favorite food of roadrunners, and in habitat you’ll frequently see them posted up halfway up the stem of a blackbrush acacia or Leucophyllum, suctioned on, their white shells stuck to the stem as if with glue. But this area has been residential for decades. There were no Rabdotus snails anywhere nearby and there surely hadn’t been for decades. This shell was also buried a foot down. So how old was this shell? It reminded me of the time I found oyster shells (probably from an Ohlone dinner 500 years earlier) buried two feet beneath the soil level in a vacant lot I was planting trees in back in Oakland. Little clues to the past.
I planted 2 Montezuma Cypress (Taxodium mucronatum), half a dozen Aloysia gratissima, half a dozen Viguiera stenoloba, 2 Croton torreyi, 2 Ebenopsis ebano (such an epic tree), a Zanthoxylum fagara (Rutaceae - leaves and fruits smell peppery and pleasant as hell), a Sideroxylon celastrinum (Sapotaceae - flowers smell incredible and fruit is edible), a few Salva coccinea, a papaya and a banana just for shits and giggles, a few different Yucca, etc.
At another location a couple miles away that was also formerly barren, I planted a ton of the really rare, small cacti that grow in this region like Echinocereus poselgeri, Echinocereus pentalophus, Astrophytum asterias, etc as well as a bunch of woody perennials like Trixis inula (Asteraceae), Manihot walkerae, Jatropha cathartica, Rayjacksonia, Euphorbia antisiphylitica, and a bunch more I’m too lazy to think of right now. My friend who lives there told me a few months later that a few weeks after I planted my cluttered little garden of native diversity in front of his house, he started noticing all the lizards and birds and toads that started hanging out again. It’s always cool to see how quick the wildlife comes back once you bring the plants back.
The beauty for me in doing this shit is coming back six months or a year later and seeing how quickly the ecology - all the little relationships and connections between organisms - has come back. It sounds fucking corny, but it really is akin to healing the landscape : undoing all the damage that this spiritually lost and mildly pyschotic species of ape - *US* - has done and watch it start to be undone. It feels incredible to watch the life come back. Plants are the basis of EVERYTHING. Bring back the native plants, and you will bring back the life that was lost. Planting native gardens and restoring the ecology is humanity’s last chance at redemption for all it’s shitty behavior and it’s sloppy mess. It’s something ANYBODY can do, even if only in little pieces and one at a time. And more than anything it just feels really good - I think inside every one of us there’s a genetic predisposition towards wanting to feel some kind of connection to the land we live on, the rock we stand on, this moment in time that we are here breathing and existing.
