The CACTUS FORESTS OF PUEBLA
The elevation near the Puebla/Oaxaca Border just South of the City of Tehuacan is roughly 5200’, but you would never know it from looking at photos of this place. I hesitate to say corny shit like this about plants or especially plant habitats, though I’m frequently inclined to, because it’s a cliche - but places like this are SACRED. Further, plant COMMUNITIES like this are sacred.
Places like this are to be revered not just because they’re beautiful, but because the whole landscape is a functioning, interwoven network of relationships between organisms that have been millions of years in the making. Relationships like this are the true fabric of place - the true meaning of what defines a location. Why were there so many bees and caterpillars on that Karwinskia humboldtiana (Rhamnaceae) shrub? It wasn’t flowering, so the fact that it had bees visiting it in droves made me look harder at the extrafloral nectaries. Caterpillars often use very toxic plants as host plants, and again I realized just how specifically toxic (Deadly poisonous) this member of the buckthorn family was. We get Karwinskia humoldtiana in South Texas, too, but it looks a world apart from the morphology of this population, which had tiny leaves (but still the same distinct venation). Meeting Euphorbia rossiana was a pleasure, too, and it resembles its Northern cousin Euphorbia antisiphylitica but grows twice as tall (to four or five feet) and has yellow cyathial bracts on its inflorescences. Once again, “variations on a theme.”
The forests of the columnar cactus Cephalocereus columna-trajani on the hillsides in the distance look like they’re an optical illusion. These cacti don’t branch, so they stand as silvery-green totem poles against a backdrop of green spiny shrubs and dull white limestone. Neobuxbaumia tetetzo (now placed in the genus Cephalocereus) is also here but they branch and form arms, though not significantly, and they don’t bend away from the sun like C. columna-trajani does. Is it corny as fuck to call these forests sacred? Probably. I imagine white girls from wealthy backgrounds who live in Mexico City and call themselves Curanderas (and no offense to them, just saying, this IS a cultural phenomenon) referring to these places as sacred, too. It sounds so canned, so typical. I guess what they mean is that it’s just a visually intoxicating place. And it certainly is. But what I mean when I call these places “sacred” is that there’s a whole lot more going on here than might just appear to be at first glance to any bipedal primate. There’s an intricate puzzle here, a network of mysteries (like just what bees are doing flying around an 8 foot tall toxic shrub that’s not flowering?) waiting to be discovered. What other secrets do these wacky fucking plants have to show us if only some random university botany student were to post up here and study them? Or even just some random schmuck who loved these creatures and knew what to look for and where to look? What about the people that live around these places? Do any of them listen to the plants? Maybe, but most humans don’t. Not anymore. Too much other bullshit to get in the way and distract them and make it all a blur. Plants are just background noise, and if you lean that way, they’re just background noise that “GOD” put there to make life interesting and give us snacks on the way to heaven.
But I think about how I could spend months walking around these calcareous cactus forests studying their behavior and the way they grow and the plants and insects that they interact with. Pull an Alan Rockefeller or a Damon Tighe and get a PCR lab set up in the back of some shitty sedan and start grinding up small bits of Cactus root and attaching bacterial or fungal primers to the DNA you extract and see what kind of symbiotic organisms you find living within the roots of these monstrous and wise old fucking cacti. Maybe there are endophytes that help these things break down and extract nutrients from their limestone substrates? What other plants grow nearby, or hide out up in the peaks and ridges in little microclimates? What was that Hemiphylacus (Asparagaceae) that I saw growing out of the rock near that shrubby tomentose member of the poison ivy family (what was the name? Actinocheita potentillifolia?)? What the shit pollinates these things? How common is moth pollination in deserts? How do moths avoid being eaten by bats, another common pollinator of deserts? What about these loud-ass cicadas? What do they eat here? What eats them?
So many questions to ask. But I’m only here a day or two, and then moving on, trying to soak up as much as I can. It’s never enough, so I just take a shit ton of photos and notes.
Why do these places not get any respect? Why are there so few of them left? Why do we constantly burn figurative libraries and art museums only to put up dollar generals and walgreens? Why do most of us do nothing about the fact that we’re trapped in a lifestyle that’s fucking eating us alive and spitting out our bones? It’s the collective unconscious rather than it is any genuine maliciousness, which is almost worse. Humanity’s “race to nowhere” as I’ve said many times before.
