Central Florida Sand Scrub
Dickinson State Park (named after a dead honky who wrecked his ship here four hundred years ago) North of Ft. Lauderdale is a gem of vestigial habitat left amidst what is generally a huge autoslum. It hosts a number of incredible plant species as well as the endangered Florida Scrub Jay.
south Florida Swamp Botany
A few photographs of various taxa I encountered while filming “KILL YOUR LAWN” in South Florida last month. I realized that the only other place that I have seen of these genera was in the Dominican Republic, most of them being tropical and Carribean/ Central American. The Carribean islands are basically just stepping stones between South America and Florida.
Ancient Irises of Tasmania
Isophysis tasmanica is a dinosaur among Irises.
Ancient Irises, Ancient Soils..
Isophysis tasmanica is the sole species in the genus Isophysis, and the sole species in the subfamily Isophysidoideae - an early-diverging lineage in the Iris Family, Iridaceae.
It grows on acidic, nutrient-poor, water-logged sands in the mountains of Western Tasmania along with Blandfordia punicea (a red-flowered, bird-pollinated monocot in its own family in orde Asparagales) and the extremely bizarre Dracophyllum milliganii, of the blueberry family, Ericaceae. The entire habitat here is dominated by the smallest Eucalyptus species in the world, Eucalyptus vernicosa and "buttongrass", Gymnoschoenus sphaerocephalus (Cyperaceae), which forms a peat-like mat with its many dead and living roots. The soils it grows in here are basically white sands weathered from billion-year-old sandstone.
Unlike all other members of the Iris Family, Isophysis tasmanica produces a superior ovary, meaning the ovary (aka the fruit) matures above the point of attachment of the tepals/perianth.
I had been wanting to see this weird and beautiful bastard for a few years, especially after seeing the incredible amount of Iris diversity in South Africa and then reading about how DNA sequencing had determined that this species, Isophysis tasmanica, was the oldest extant lineage of the family, which makes sense, because many ancient lineages of plants Gondwanan relicts seem to have Western Tasmania as the only current place that they can be found, presumably having gone extinct everywhere else in their former range.
Filming and photographing this day, we got dumped on with intermittent ice storms. It would clear up and the sun would come out for five minutes, then it would raining freezing drizzle or tiny hail pebbles the next minute. This occurred on and off the entire morning, which is perfectly normal Tasmanian mountain summer weather from what I understand. Thanks to my friend @isophysis for the lead on the phenology at this particular location.
Full video out in three weeks. Pic 6 shows a burned "forest" of the shortest Eucalypt, Eucalyptus vernicosa, with Dracophyllum milliganii and Isophysis in the “understory".
Identity politics as the new astrology
Identitarianism has become the new astrology. On its own it’s completely understandable - in a homogenized consumer society where the physical landscape is the same assortment of parking lots and consumer retail everywhere, no place in the United States seems to have much of its own individual identity (or culture) anymore. Youth growing up in this kind of bleak landscape are understandably grasping for some sort of self-validation or self-identity that will form the foundation of their understanding of the world around them. Born out of a reasonable attempt to come to terms with a long history of human injustice, genocide, oppression, & European colonialism, and given the current cultural landscape & the recent Advent of social media, identity politics has now morphed into a take on human beings and human societies that misses reality entirely, yet plays into our worst, age-old tribalistic urges to divide into opposing social groups. Mix this with the reality of an eroding middle-class, go-nowhere suburbs and go-nowhere jobs, and…
Philosophically, this is an existentialist nightmare - like something out of the most dystopian version of an Albert Camus novel.
Social media has made an already bleak and depressing cultural situation all the more deranged, offering young people endless opportunities to compare themselves to one another through the distorted and completely inaccurate lens of handheld pocket computers, each equipped with a camera that can record video. Young people growing up in this landscape are facing an uphill battle in terms of their psychological development. The utterly deranged venue of social media accounts and one’s self-image as filtered through the number of acquired likes has become the mirror for this generation, yet the image it reflects back to the viewer is highly inaccurate, formed by a collective aggregation of the viewers that have interacted with it. This puts a whole new spin on the human group dynamics and social behavior, and more importantly - the development of the self.
It could almost be argued that it would be extremely hard for true self-awareness and genuine self-development to be able to occur in this kind of atmosphere, at least while psychologically plugged into social meia. Rather than developing organically on its own, with the constant infusion of social media into daily life the sense of one’s self now develops with near-constant self-consciousness due to the ability to sculpt one’s image in the eye of the ever-watching audience. I feel like some of the dadaists - and later the situationists - saw this coming.
The plant known as “strawberry pine” (which isn't a pine at all)
A "living fossil", now restricted to cold windswept mountains of Tasmania. This plant is a classic case of PALEOENDEMISM.
Microcachrys tetragona is a strange conifer colloquially known as "strawberry pine" , though it bears no relation to pines, which evolved much later than this family of conifers - Podocarpaceae - which occur primarily in the Tropics & Southern Hemisphere.
Microcachrys occurs at elevations of 3,000' or more, where it sprawls over rocks as a creeping plant, never taller than a few inches. The relatively modest elevation is high enough to be alpine here, as we are at roughly 43° South Latitude. Two weeks from the Southern Summer solstice and soon after I took this picture, we got hailed on. The temperature was about 38° fahrenheit.
The red cone (not a fruit, because this is not a angiosperm) is edible, but according to Woody tastes somewhat insufferably like conifer resin, though initially it was somewhat sweet.
Last photo is of the habitat, and a stand of both Athrotaxis cupressoides and Athrotaxis selaginoides, which are another ancient lineage of conifer.
I couldn't help standing here and thinking that at some point Microcachrys, as well as Athrotaxis, Nothofagus, many of the Epacrids (bluebe family, Ericaceae) and some of the alpine Eucalyptus (such E. coccifera and subcrenulata) MUST have composed some of the plant community of Antarctica before it fully froze over a few million years ago. And indeed it did - fossil pollen of both Microcachrys & Nothofagus are ubiquitous in Antarctic rocks
It's such a bizarre plant community, and the Highlands of Central Tasmania act as a time capsule to preserve so many of these species of conifer that were surely once more ubiquitous (or relatives of more ubiquitous taxa) and far more widespread, eons ago.
Getting this perspective on life on Earth is much do what we got me hooked on Botany in the first place.
Huon “pines” & temperate rainforests of gondwana
Lagarostrobos franklinii is an extremely long-lived member of the “ancient” conifer family Podocarpaceae, a family with a primarily Southern Hemisphere and tropical distribution. Members of this family can be tiny subshrubs or massive, gargantuan lumber trees. Many species have “cones” (aka “naked seeds” aka “megastrobili” (megastrobilus, singular) that are frequently bird-dispersed, thought that doesn’t seem to be the case in this species. Modern phylogenies seem to place the evolution of Podocarpaceae at the Triassic-Jurassic Boundary. It is a very “old” plant family.
I had been wanting to see this species - Lagarostrobos franklinii - for years, and finally got the chance to observe it in habitat, in the seemingly perpetually-wet, chilly temperate rainforests of Western Tasmania, where it frequently grows along creeks or streams or in very wet soils. It is almost always covered in epiphytic ferns and mosses as the habitat is just that wet. It was logged extensively between 1800 to the 1980s, and most old growth save for the most inaccessible and remote is now gone. However there are a few populations that remain, including one we visited which is partially pictured here, which was only discovered in the 1970s or 80s. I filmed this population the day we were here taking photos (video out on the Crime Pays Patreon now), and some of these trees are easily 1500 to 2,000 years old. Reportedly there is a a very large clone that has been cloning itself for a consistent 10,000 years, as this species grows extremely slowly and easily roots its branches as well as sends up new shoots intermittently. The wood was highly prized for ship-building as it is so resistant to rot, and one can see how being so rot-resistant would be an evolutionary advantage in such a wet habitat. The photos of growth rings and the photo of the slice (with my friend Matt looking intentionally ridiculous in it, as he did with a massive Copiapoa when I asked him to step next to it for scale) were taken at a local museum in Geeveston. You can see from the photo that Lagarostrobos add a new centimer in trunk diameter roughly every 30 years, it is one of the most slow-growing conifers I’ve encountered.
The ground everywhere at this site was mounded from the remnants of old logs of this tree had fallen over centuries ago and simply not rotted. A small creek ran through the population, which had - like the trees themselves - probably been there for millenia. The terrestrial leeches (harmless) abound at this site, as did a few massive specimens of Eucalyptus obliqua, which occupy the sites that aren’t as wet. To be here at this stand of trees felt like stepping back in time into the Miocene temperate rainforests of Antarctica. Atherosperma moschatum (Laurales) grew sympatric, as did Nothofagus cunninghamii, Drymophila cyanocarpa (Alstroemeriaceae), Telopea truncata (Proteaceae), Gahnia grandis (Cyperaceae), Notelaea ligustrina (Oleaceae), Anopterus glandulosus (Escalloniaceae), Tasmannia lanceolata (Winteraceae) and countless species of mosses and ferns. This stand of trees had NEVER been logged, which is unfortunately a rarity.
What amazed me most was how small the seeds and megastrobili were, the “cones” themselves resembling little zig-zag branching structures less than an inch long. I presume that Lagarostrobos, like most Podocarps, is dioecious.
Masters of Obscurity : Astrophytum asterias
Astrophytum asterias in habitat in South Texas
Astrophytum asterias, also known as the sand dollar cactus or star cactus, is probably one of the most fascinating as well as the most threatened plants that grows within the United States. Its populations have been declining due to habitat loss as well as drought. Plants are obligate out-crossers and unlike Peyote, which they sometimes can be found growing next to, Astrophytum tends to grow rather exposed, only sometimes being partially shaded and protected by the succulent, suffrutescent member of Asteraceae known as Varilla texana (one of two species in the genus Varilla), which is an equally mysterious plant that occupies the same open, exposed gravel beds and often very salty soil. Astrophytum asterias extends down into Southern Tamaulipas, Mexico, growing in scattered populations in similar habitat. Little is known about the Southern populations.
Most interesting about this plant, the plant tends to recess almost entirely into the soil (if you can call this substrate that) that it grows in, sometimes only partially exposed. This makes surveying for it akin to a game of Where’s Waldo. Sadly, this plant is not as protected as it should be, and as the region that it grows in continues to suffer from development (lots of land clearance, as more people move here from Hidalgo and Cameron County, further East, to build their tacky “dream ranches” and McMansion-style architectural atrocities. Texas property taxes and agricultural exemptions tend to incentivize land clearance, which - when added to the fact that this grows in a region where so many are ignorant of or uncaring of the region’s incredible flower and ecology - has doomed many plant populations such as Astrophytum as well as Peyote.
Taxodium TAXONOMIC clusterf*ck in Central Texas
For years, the “Cypress” (not a true cypress, which are Western North American trees in the genus Hesperocyparis; and Cupressus in Eurasia) trees in central Texas have been referred to as Taxodium distichum, which they are explicitly NOT due to a number of shared morphological as well as ecological trademarks possessed by the Mexican species, Taxodium mucronatum.
The Flora of North America section covering the genus Taxodium - which was written in 1985 - for whatever reason decided that these trees are Taxodium distichum, which is a tree of Eastern Swamps.
I generally hate lumpers (as opposed to “splitters”) because in lumping species together, taxonomists can sometimes obscure blatant morphological and ecological differences.
In the case of Taxodium mucronatum vs. Taxodium distichum, to pretend that millions of years of evolution in drastically different habitats has had no discernible effect on the traits of the two species is silly.
First, let's discuss the habitat differences…
Taxodium mucronatum in Mexico (and the Rio Grande Valley of Texas) occupies streams and creeks (sometimes dry) in seasonally arid climates. This habitat makes Taxodium mucronatum much more likely to experience drought stress than Taxodium distichum (which almost never experiences drought stress).
Taxodium distichum in Louisiana, Mississippi (and on up in to Southern Illinois) occupies boggy swamps that NEVER fully dry out. Likely because of it's perpetually wet habitat and very soft, water-logged soil Taxodium distichum almost always forms “knees” if it's roots are submerged. It was once thought these “pneumatophores” were an adaptation to helping the trees roots acquire oxygen. This seems pretty unlikely, and it much more reasonable to assume that the adapti benefit of these “knees” is that they aid in stabilization.
Why is it likely that the central Texas Taxodium species is Taxodium mucronatum? First, San Antonio and Austin Texas are much more ecologically and climatically in line - comparatively speaking - with the habitat of South Texas and Eastern Mexico, which are decidedly NOT swamps.
Second, the WILD (not planted, as many Taxodium distich have been planted in places like San Marcos, Texas) Taxodium that occurs in Central Texas in places like Austin, San Antonio, San Marcos, Seguin and even East to Uvalde never form “knees” but have roots that instead form rebar-like cages over the stream banks. These trees also have a much different habit from Taxodium distichum when full grown. Taxodium distichum tends to get taller than and stay much narrow from Taxodium mucronatum, which tends to be a much stouter bastard and spreads out (take El Arbol del Tule in Oaxaca, for example).
Also, as one would expect given the differences of habitat, Taxodium mucronatum also displays a greater drought tolerance (though still not much) in cultivation then Taxodium distichum. Having grown them both in South Texas, which is remarkably drier than the swamps of Eastern Texas and Louisiana, I can confirm this.
Why does this matter if not for some petty squabble among taxonomists? When we ignore the vast differences between two species in both their evolution and ecology, we can disturb ecosystems by planting the wrong tree in restoration projects, meaning the project fails when an ecologically inappropriate (read: not adapted to drought) species later fails during exposure to an ecological condition (ie drought) to which it has not much experienced in its evolutionary history. Taxodium mucronatum has had a few million years of selection pressures in the hot-as-balls and sometimes VERY dry habitat of Central Texas - an ecosystem and set of conditions in which Taxodium distichum has explicitly not (nevermind the possible differences in adaptation to PH regarding the acidity of an Eastern Swamp versus the limestone rocky-stream-bank substrate of Central Texas.
Both species are wonderful plants and exceptional trees, remnants of the Jurassic like many members of their family (Cupressaceae), but ecology and evolution matter, so let's not skip over those stories for the sake of being taxonomically lazy.
Desert Liatris ….
This is a genus that you don't normally see in the desert, normally associating it with the prairies. Yet here is Liatris punctata var. mexicana growing on 100 million ocean Sediments in West Texas. What a treat.
Tecate Cypress Check-Up
Visited the Guatay Population of the rare Tecate Cypress. It is one of only maybe 9 or 10 populations of this species found worldwide. It’s a pretty peculair trait that so many California chaparral plants have peeling and exfoliating bark (Arctostaphylos, Adenostoma sparsifolium, Hesperocyparis, etc).
I first became interested in this tree after seeing a plant growing in cultivation and noticing how incredible the bark looked - smooth and peeling in strips of red, gray, pink, and purple. I then learned how rare it is in the wild, all of it’s populations restricted to small sites throughout Coastal Southern California and Baja California. I’ve since grown many of these trees from seed. It does exceedingly well in cultivation. A tree I planted on 16th St in Oakland near the intersection of Peralta grew to 20’ wide by 18’ tall in 7 years. Trees must be pruned up as they grow but the leaves smell incredible as do the cones and they are excellent shade trees.
The entire plant community at the Guatay site has not had a fire in quite some time and needs one soon (and will have one soon, whether anybody likes it or not, as fire is an inevitability in this landscape). Everything that grows here shows a very obvious evolution with fire. That’s what makes the chaparral so special (and so tick-free). To access this site I had to crawl through the brush on my hands and knees, in some places I was not able to stand up for nearly 40’ of distance. It really is a corn maze of pleasant smelling plants and soil duff. Sympatric plants included Arctostaphylos glandulosa, Cercocarpus betuloides (Rosaceae), Quercus beberidifolia (oak family, Fagaceae) and Eriophyllum confertiflorum (Asteraceae).
It was a fucking treat to see some beautiful stands of Adenostoma sparsifolium (Rosaceae) further on down the road after leaving the Cypress stand. The bark on this species is incredible.
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.
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.
The INCREDIBLE LLARETA : Azorella Compacta
The selection pressures of a high, dry environment such as that of the Andes of Northern Chile will shape the evolutionary trajectory of many plant species, and the way such selection pressures manifest is nowhere better represented than in the morphology of the long-lived, high-Andean “carrot” (family Apiaceae) Azorella compacta. It takes many adaptations to be able to grow in the high, dry Andes of Northern Chile - resistance to frost, dessication (drying out), as well as a way to deal with the raised intensity of ultraviolet light and exposure (the UV is stronger since there’s about 14,000’ worth of atmosphere LESS that ultraviolet waves must travel through to reach plants at this altitude versus plants at sea level.
This high Andean member of the carrot family - Azorella compacta - posses adaptations to each. Plants grow compact and matted, as do many other sympatric species at this elevation such as Pycnophyllum tetrastichum (Caryophyllaceae). Growing as a “carpet” helps a plant stay closer to the ground where temperatures are slightly warmer due to the ground being heated by the sun’s infrared, as well as staying out of the dry, dessicating winds.
Azorella compacta also has a thick cuticle - a waxy covering that prevents its tightly compacted leaf rosettes from transpiring too much moisture. Thick cuticular wax is a great benefit in a dry environment. This thick wax - as well as the resin (which smells like the notorious furanocoumarin chemistry of the carrot family) - also helps protect Azorella compacta, aka “llareta” from the high intensity UV rays at this elevation. Individual plants of this species are though to be able to live for upwards of a couple thousand years. And it makes sense given their high, dry habitat. Once a plant has mastered the art of growing in such an extreme environment, few other things - pestilent insects or disease are both negligible at this altitude - few things can harm it.
“Conservation biology =eugenics. Really?”
This being America in the 21st Century, there is no shortage of epically ridiculous things that people have said (or especially tweeted) and belched forth into the ether. This take - “Conservation biology was born from Eugenics” - muttered from a mouthpiece that looks like the kind of person whose style of dress would serve as an automatic red flag that rent in the neighborhood was about to go up - really tops the list of “stupid shit that I have heard this week” (nowhere close to the infamous "Taxonomy is literally the history of white people stealing things” twitter quote I came across in 2021).
This take was written in response to a paper that was published entitled “Overpopulation is a Major Cause of Biodiversity Loss and Smaller Human Populations Are Necessary to Preserve What Is Left”, the abstract of which can be viewed here : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006320722001999.
And who could argue against the idea that an exponentially growing human population is a threat to the entire rest of the biosphere? It seems like such simple and easy common sense. One need not be a math wiz to see that when the population of any species on Planet Earth grows too big, it becomes a threat not only to other species in the biosphere but especially to itself - to its own health. Deer populations grow too big due to humans exterminating all the predators? The deer begin to cause the extirpation and local extinction of many of the native plant species that they must eat to survive. Eventually disease and starvation afflict the population, and the population crashes, causing unnecessary suffering on a scale that would have been impossible had a healthy population of deer been maintained. Surely one would have to be out of their right mind - or just plain ignorant on the issue - to suggest that humans can go on growing exponentially and somehow avoid damage to the rest of the biosphere as well as unnecessary suffering to themselves.
Yet this is exactly the viewpoint that I’ve unfortunately seen start to pop up on the left as of late (I would never expect the right - with their innate adherence to religious dogma, anthropocentrism and general complete ignorance of (as well as lack of respect for) science - especially natural sciences - to ever entertain the idea that too many humans could pose a threat to the rest of the biosphere, though I could indeed imagine a right-wing take on overpopulation as embodied in the lyrics to the song "Shrink” by the Dead Kennedys).
In the past few years, I have frequently shit on “woke culture”. But I have to be clear here - my use of the word “woke” is much, much different than say, a Republican senator from Missouri’s use of the word :woke”, or the way that a covertly-racist suburban father dressed in the most bland and hideous Kirkland Signature cargo shorts and polo shirt might complain about the “woke mob”. “Woke” to me doesn’t mean somebody that acknowledges racism exists, or that America has a very dark and often ingrained history of oppression/suppression/persecution of various races/ethnic groups/genders/sexual orientations. When I use the word “woke” I’m not using it do describe people who think this country needs affordable healthcare, or that industry needs to be regulated, or that gay people should have civil rights. All of that is common sense to me, and the only people who would argue against it are the kind of unenlightened, untraveled, semi-conscious halfwits who’ve never left their home town and are deftly afraid of the world as it exists beyond the 4 walls of their small-minded figurative enclave.
When I use the word “woke”, I’m instead describing a very unfortunate phenomenon that I’ve seen pop up among the left in the last fifteen years or so, a phenomenon which is a boon for the recruitment of the right-wing (one of their best recruiting tools, probably) and which only works to divide and turn people away from the core ideas of the left. It is a phenomenon that goes hand in hand with the opportunities for showboating and public performance that social media provides.
“Woke culture” to me describes a kind of short-sighted cultural phenomenon that thinks that morally lecturing and speaking down to (mostly all online rather than in person, of course) - anybody who’s not 100% in agreement with your political take - is an effective strategy for changing people’s minds and changing culture. But woke-ism has not changed the culture. Woke-ism has instead turned many people off from core leftist ideas (like affordable & universal healthcare, or funding public education, or creating opportunities for equity). All woke-ism has done is create a culture dedicated to fear and shame, where those within the ranks who might otherwise possess highly-intellectual and critical minds capable of great ideas towards the advancement of leftist ideas and towards the advancement of humanity in general are afraid to break ranks with the herd for fear of being called out on twitter as morally and ethically inferior or guilty. This kind of “online activism” likely feels good, but in the end all you’ve done is create a culture of sycophants who all parrot the same talking points out of fear of being attacked publicly online. How is THIS any different than what the right has done? Well, for one, the right doesn’t waste time constantly shitting on and attacking each other. I guess they have that going for them.
Woke Culture has infused leftism with the kind of obnoxious, lecturing moral superiority that is an automatic turn-off to the people that need to hear it the most. It has become directly equivalent to old-school evangelical Christian proselytizing, yet nobody who participates in it would seemingly ever have the self-awareness to be able to see this or especially acknowledge it. Right-wing, left-wing, religious or not - this is what humans often seem to do when they get on their soapbox and find some kind of self-righteous moral cause to be swept away with which they let consume them. I think the Buddhists had some kind of term for this kind of thinking, though I can’t remember what it was. I’m absolutely sure that they were as fucking annoyed by it as I am, though.
Regardless, this kind of ranting and rabidly proselytizing approach that the modern left has taken up is pleasing to the ears of those in the choir that one may be preaching to, but beyond the feeling of moral self-righteous and satisfaction it grants to those parties it does little in the way of actually changing the minds of anyone who needs to hear it. It especially fails at changing culture (at least not in the way it purportedly intends to).
Part of the reason that the hippies in the 60s and early 70s were initially so successful in changing the very stiff culture and ethos left behind by the 1950s was because they made it fun. The wokies wouldn’t know the word fun if it ran up and bit them on the ass. The wokies have painted themselves as strictly anti-fun and anti-humor. They have unknowingly painted themselves into the caricature of being the FUN COP, where every single bit of cultural minutiae has to be passed through a strict filter of moral purity and the highest level of ethical superiority. They grant nobody the benefit of the doubt, know nothing of nuance or context, and view every potential post in the comments section as an opportunity to correct or re-educate someone (often by publicly shitting on them) on their ethical flaws and ingrained personality failings. In short, the wokies generally suck. It has become a cult. And it has (very unfortunately) totally tainted and infused most facets of American leftism. It has worked so well to fracture and turn people away from the left that it almost makes one wonder if it was somehow an intentional operation initiated by infiltrators on the right.
But back to the overpopulation issue. It seems like common sense that an ideal human population on Planet Earth would be one that’s a few billion in number below what we have right now. In this way, we could prevent damage to the rest of the biosphere, we could prevent species extinctions, and we could prevent all the myriad other problems, stresses and afflictions that arise - poverty, inequality, civil unrest due to food shortages and competition for resources, plagues, etc. - from any species being unequivocally abundant in number. I should add that I don’t foresee this happening any time soon, if ever, as we are still too “un-enlightened” of a species to ever figure out a way to do this, not to mention a humane and reasonable way to achieve this such as lowering birth rates via education, women’s rights, and an increased standard of living for all. While no species has ever willfully regulated its own population by controlling growth (always instead hitting a brick wall of reality and letting catastrophe do it for them), you would think that a supposedly “higher” and more self-aware species such as humans would figure out a way to make it happen so as to avoid the inevitable consequence of diminishing the quality of its own habitat. As primates, we are still too new to this “consciousness” thing and still too far below where we need to be at intellectually and empathetically, as a culture, to ever stand a chance of reaching some kind of consensus like this anytime in the next century or two (or five).
It is estimated that at a first world standard of living a sustainable human population on Earth would be around 2 billion. Beyond that, we start to take more than the resources of Earth can give and we slowly begin to diminish the global natural resource “bank account”, eventually reaching a negative balance which will only continue to grow larger as long as the population continues to, as well. If we were willing to do away with some of the unnecessary luxuries of most first world countries, we could probably double that sustainability equivalent to 4 billion. Today, world population is an estimated 8 billion. It is projected to be 10 billion by 2050, and 13 billion by 2100. With the levels of extinction and habitat loss what they are today, how can the human species possibly exist in such large numbers without causing the inevitable decline of the rest of the biosphere? The math simply doesn’t add up.
And so what do the wokies have to say about this? The first step to addressing a problem is to admit that you indeed have a problem. But the wokies simply refuse to admit that there indeed might be a problem. It’s easier to scapegoat with an already obvious villain that - to be fair - does deserve it’s fair share of blame on the issue of ecological devastation : Capitalism. Oblivious to most issues regarding natural sciences and ecology as they are seemingly only educated in the field of social sciences, they have created a straw man : “Anybody who espouses the idea that human overpopulation is a threat to the rest of the biosphere is an advocate and supporter of eco-fascism.” Eco-fascism? Since when have the tenets of fascism (militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the good of the nation, and strong regimentation of society and the economy) and the study of ecological connections within a living system of thousands of interconnected organisms ever had anything to do with each other? The idea is fucking preposterous, an oxymoron of the most ridiculous kind. But it doesn’t matter - we’ll just make it up and say that it’s a thing. And what is their proof? That some shit-for-brains white nationalist shoots up a mall somewhere and mentions “declining resources for the white race” in an online manifesto? There we have it - ecofascism.
I first saw this kind of tainted thinking arise during the start of the covid pandemic before we knew the scale of and virulence of this virus. As millions of people were forced to stay inside and business everywhere came to a halt, pollution levels decreased, smoggy skies cleared up and wild animals everywhere began to re-occupy areas where they had been excluded from due to high human populations for centuries. People began to mutter the somewhat corny phrase “the Earth is healing”, added as a caption to a photo of a whale swimming through a shipping channel that was formerly clogged with container ships. It was a corny phrase, to be taken with a grain of salt for sure, but it had a point. Most anybody who’s not a moron can take a look around at what the human species is doing here on Earth and admit that it’s - at best - a complete fucking mess. At worst, it’s a direct and existential threat to the rest of life on Earth. Something needs to change to avoid catastrophe. My vote is for our current behavior and our future birth rates, rather than our immediate population numbers, though this seems unlikely. It has been shown that birth rates automatically tend to drop once standard of living, opportunities and education go up. Boom. There’s your recipe right there. Bring people up from poverty, increase access to education, and most importantly - don’t be afraid to publicly acknowledge that too large a human population means the decline in the populations and overall welfare of the rest of the species in the biosphere. This is simple math, and it doesn’t mean that humans are an inately bad species, it just means that we have to play by the same rules as every other species in Earth’s biosphere - our numbers get too large, nature knocks us back, but not before we start to knock back the populations of all the other species in our immediate ecosystem and habitat (which in this case is the entire planet, unfortunately). To me, this just seems like common sense. Nothing is inherently offensive about it. But to the wokies (and of course all the world’s major religions, as well), this is heresy.
Never missing an opportunity to culturally re-educate the masses, the wokies stepped in. Twitter accounts of the most annoying mental brand all began parroting the word “eco-fascism”. “Humans aren’t a virus, Capitalism is a virus” they said. David Attenborough was even soon attacked as being an “eco-fascist” for the insistence in some of his BBC documentaries that human civilization itself was inadvertently causing the decline of the biosphere and the 6th mass extinction on Planet Earth.
This is where the cultural re-education comes in. Was Shel Silverstein an “eco-fascist”, too, for the controversial children’s book he published called The Giving Tree? This text clearly paints humanity as a species that takes way more than it gives. This is incorrect heresy. It seems Shel Silverstein simply never “de-colonized his mind” and educated himself on “indigenous” cultures and “indigenous" land ethics. Yes, because when we need an example of an archetype sustainable operating structure for how to run a civilization of 8 billion people without running both it and the planet it occupies into the ground, what better example to use than a pre-industrial society that probably only ever reached a population level of a few million people spread out over two giant continents? For all the beauty and reverence for non-human life forms inherent in many indigenous American cultures, we need to stop with the fetishizing of an entire race of people consisting of thousands of different tribes, each with their unique and different worldviews and belief systems. It’s gross, mildly offensive, and mentally lazy. Why not instead focus on the ideas that some of these cultures and tribes espoused rather then fetishizing them all as a caricature?
While there is undoubtedly much to say about the failures of modern capitalism to protect (or even account for) the health of the biosphere, I get uncomfortable at the idea of letting people think that is just capitalism that is the problem here, rather than a cultural worldview that would probably exist (and has existed) among the human population no matter what kind of “-ism” was in place as an operating system. The problem isn’t just “capitalism”, the problem is Anthropocentrism, an unenlightened belief that we are somehow special, that we are separate and apart from the biosphere that sustains us and therefore that we shouldn’t have to play by the same rules.
So in the wokie ethos regarding overpopulation - it isn’t real, and it doesn’t exist. It just a bunch of Malthusian “eco-fascist” nonsense meant to drum up support for a conspiratorial “eugenics program” that will one day be used to suppress populations of the poor and communities of color. While that last bit certainly seems like an agenda on the minds of more than a few on the right, the idea that there is a conspiracy among ecologists and naturalists to use overpopulation as an excuse to advance the agenda of white nationalists is a deranged and absurd strawman that simply doesn’t make any logical sense (most ecologists I know are devout progressives that hold inherently anti-racist beliefs, or believe themselves to and aspire to, at least) or pan out with reality. So overpopulation? Best not to talk about it. It isn’t real. Sweep it under the rug and ignore it. Complete fucking madness.
So what are their talking points? Well, the most common talking point here is kind of an obfuscation, as it’s a rebuttal to an argument that nobody is really making. They correctly point out that first world countries (and a handful of select corporations, specifically) are responsible for the bulkload of carbon dioxide emissions. But wait - carbon dioxide emissions? I thought we were talking about exponentially-growing human populations, in which case the most direct threat to the biosphere would be habitat loss : forests being burned to set up pasture land for cattle and farmland to grow crops? Aquifers being drained. Rivers being diverted for agriculture and hydro-electric. Rivers being filled with garbage and pollution. Roads being built into formerly unreachable wilderness areas, which automatically bring an infusion of human development and a destruction of habitat.
Nobody here was ever incorrectly arguing that carbon dioxide emissions were mostly the fault of poor countries, or that poor countries need to be singled out as opposed to their often much more ecologically devastating rich counterparts. Further, as the obvious negative ecological effects of poverty are undeniable, it would seem important for anybody that wants to minimize human impact on the biosphere to want to advocate on the behalf of the poor so as to bring them out of the kind of desperate situations that cause one to do things like inadvertently destroy one’s surrounding ecosytem for the sake of survival. So why are we talking about the carbon dioxide emissions of first world countries when habitat loss is the most direct and conspicuous threat to the biosphere caused by uncontrolled human population growth? Nonsense.
Another common talking point begins with an introduction of how “indigenous communities” and “indigenous stewardship” need to be given the steering wheel when it comes to the future of human civilization. This I actually agree with in principle, however it’s far too simple of a talking point, and I’ve grown somewhat nauseous at the seemingly unthinking fetishization of “indigenous” culture that seems so prevalent in the modern American leftist ethos. I believe it’s born out of an inherently good-intention, but as so many phenomena with social media it has become an annoying talking point that means next to nothing anymore. It seems that many people parroting this talking point could not adequately describe in detail the belief systems and ideologies possessed by some “indigenous” cultures that make them notable. Rather than saying that I think it much better to say that the land ethics and values systems espoused by some indigenous cultures the world over we would be very wise to try to adopt in to our current civilization.
And that’s exactly my point - lets’ focus on the ideas and ethics we admire in some indigenous, pre-industrial civilizations rather than fixating on some absurd and creepy idolizing of the civilizations themselves. At the same time, we must remain aware that this kind of stewardship and relationship to the land existed in a time very much removed and almost incomparably different from our own, with a population that was barely a fraction in number compared to what exists today, and to adopt these ethics and belief systems into our civilization - were it even possible - we would need to add a few updates and fundamentally think this through a bit more rather than just tweeting 280 characters as a rebuttal to a fact that makes us uncomfortable.
The land ethics of many indigenous American cultures espoused an innate reverence and respect for other organisms that humans shared the land with, regardless of the species in question having any direct use or purpose important to human beings. This is a belief that is an indicator of an enlightened outlook, and we would do well to adopt this in into our modern culture. It is a fundamentally flawed, short-sighted and inherently unintelligent belief that the only organisms worthy of “keeping around” are those that directly benefit our species in some way.
Today we face many threats to our own survival, all of them directly caused by ourselves. We would do well to avoid at all costs obfuscating the issue by doing things like misplacing blame solely on a single economic system (though it certainly bares an inordinately large share of blame for the current ecological wreckage) or especially, to avoid sweeping issues like overpopulation under the rug and refusing to talk about them - and demonizing anyone who does.
Gypsum Badlands of West Texas
In the Chihuahua Desert of West Texas grow some incredible endemic plant species that are so adapted to the specific soils of the region - dictated by calcium carbonate and calcium sulfate (gypsum) geology - that they grow nowhere else on Earth. The substrate here consists of 120 million year old ocean sediments that have been uplifted and tilted at various angles (often dipping to the North), with various exposures of both limestone and gypsum, the latter often occurring in the form of the mineral selenite. Gypsum, of course, acts as a selection force on plant species, and it tends to induce the evolution of new species of plants, ones that are specifically adapted to the harsh chemistry and mechanical of this often barren geology.
Eriogonum havardii is one of them. Buckwheats are always cool, and the genus Eriogonum is exceptionally species-rich throughout the arid West of North America, but this species and its mounding, clumping habit consisting of dozens of rosettes of very hispid leaves makes it one of the coolest. It is often one of the only plants growing out in the center of these badland areas.
Anulocaulis leisolenus is another very cool and very rare species endemic to gypsum badlands. This member of the Bougainvillea Family, Nyctaginaceae, has very leathery, coriaceous leaves covered in thick wax and produces bright pink elongated flowers with exserted stamens that is likely hummingbird or moth pollinated. What impressed me most about this plant was the thick woody caudex which the plant can die back to in times of drought.
The Devil’s Graveyard & the strawberry Tuff
Some incredible geologic features of Trans-Pecos Texas make themselves evident in the volcaniclastic (sedimentary rocks composed of volcanic materials) rocks of the Devil’s Graveyard Formation, a layer of volcanic ash that was originally ejected from a series of volcanoes 42 million years ago and then carried away by rivers and streams and later deposited in lakes and riverbeds. 42 million years ago the dinosaurs had already been extinct for 24 million years and mammals (most of them completely unrecognizable to any of us today) had come to dominate the landscape. Many of these mammals have been preserved in this layer of volcaniclastic rocks and sediments.
To make this exposure even cooler, these hoodoos and gullies are topped by a younger and much harder layer of basalt which is protects the softer tuff below as the basalt is more resistant to erosion and weathering. The brick-red layer in the center is known as the strawberry tuff.
WEST TEXAS PEYOTE HABITAT & a 20 MINUTE DOWNPOUR
I had the pleasure yesterday of visiting a modest but wide population of Lophophora williamsii as well as a few other notable and utterly cool species of plants, ending the day with a much-needed 20 minute downpour of rain and one of West Texas’s many intoxicating sunsets.
For those that don’t know, the habitat in West Texas is much drier and much different from where the only other US population of the Peyote Cactus grows, in South Texas. In South Texas, the climate in summer ( and sometimes in winter, too!) is more akin to a 24 hour Bikram Yoga studio. That is, 103 degrees F with 75% humidity, with humidity tapering off the farther you get from the Gulf Coast. Peyote used to occur in Hidalgo County, further East, but that population was likely extirpated decades ago, and as Hidalgo County is much more densely populated than Starr or Zapata County, peyote is likely extinct there. The ideal habitat for peyote in South Texas is on limestone caliche soils, growing beneath other shrubs such Texas Persimmon (Diospyros texana), Blackbrush “Acacia” (Vachellia rigidula), or other often leguminous shrubs and small trees. As this area is more humid and less prone to drought (often receiving rainstorms from the Gulf), the population here is mostly only threatened with human development, not climate change.
The populations of Peyote further West, in much drier habitats, like Presidio County, where it frequently grows beneath Ocotillo (Fouquieria splendens) or Candelila (Euphorbia antisyphillitica), are much more likely to be affected by drought and increasingly drier climatic conditions that climate models (and data) seem to indicate those regions will be experiencing. And this is exactly what we witnessed yesterday : many peyote looking extremely drought stressed, displaying pinkand red stress pigments (betalains since these are in order Caryophyllales and all members of this order save for two families still retain this synapomorphy for betalains that the lineage evolved millions of years ago). Many plants looked incredibly shriveled, and it seemed amazing that they were growing here - in such a barren habitat - at all. My friend Dr. Martin Terry, having dedicated his life to studying this plant and much more knowledgeable than I about it - insisted that they would survive, however. Regardless, we poured some water on the plants. This turned out to be unnecessary though, because half an hour later we graced with a magnificent and sudden twenty minute downpour.
Any peyote that were growing in shadier conditions, say at the base of a rockwall, were much healthier-looking though, and we did see a few of these. We also saw the notorious Koeberlinia spinosa in flower. This plant also occurs in South Texas and Northern Mexico and is a spiny stem-photosynthesizer that is bizarre enough to be the only species in its family and is related to mustards (Order Brassicales).
We also saw a few specimens of the living rock cactus, Ariocarpus fissuratus, looking good, too.
LAND CLEARANCE and Rare Plants In South texas
Recently I drove through some spots in South Texas that I frequent to check on the plants there. The temperature was 99 F, but I have grown accustomed to living in the 24-hour Bikram Yoga Studio that is South Texas. I came across many of my favorite members of this plant community in fruit and producing seed, including the rare Asclepias prostrata. Another friend had bagged the seed in order to propagate and cultivate seedlings of this rare plant for a botanic garden in hopes of establishing an ex-situ population of it should the wild populations ever get knocked out (or more likely bulldozed, as Texas affords literally no protections for many of its rare plants). I collected the seed, and tied the bags around the remaining fruits (termed follicles in the case of the Apocynaceae), as the fruits split open when mature and disperse the seeds. Milkweed seeds have a feathery “ploof” attached to them called a coma, making them easily dispersed by wind, thus tying mesh bags around them is necessary.
I also collected seed of Vachellia (formerly Acacia, until it was determined by DNA - as well as common sense - that Acacia was not monophyletic) rigidula, a plant that was incorrectly assumed to contain psychoactive alkaloids in a 98 paper. I believe this was later retracted, but many legumes - and mimosoids specifically - do produce a diverse array of interesting secondary chemicals. My reverence for Vachellia rigidula (also known as black brush) lies not in its chemistry however, but in its ecological importance in its habitat. This tough little legume shrub provides shade for a number of very cool and very rare cacti to grow under, including peyote. Very cacti in South Texas grow out in the open - temperatures are too hot and the sun too strong to make that a photosynthetically prosperous place to grow. The heat and the intense UV will simply shut down photosynthesis in such extreme amounts. So the best place to grow - as the habitat is so extreme - is in the shade of shrubs. And one of the most common shrubs that serves that purpose is a spiny little legume that produces wonderful-smelling flowers called Vachellia rigidula.
I was disappointed to see yet more land clearance, though. I got some photos with a drone, and they are disheartening, showing extensive land clearance. This land clearance is incentivized by the state and local government here, the idea that clearing the land makes it “productive”. It seems a rather shit-for-brained concept, and indeed it is. But again, the culture down here seems to HATE the thornscrub. It is seen as good for nothing save for maybe providing habitat for over-populated deer, of which an entire local industry is centered around (a friend of mine in the area actually ranches deer, which seems to make a lot more sense in this area than ranching cows). I’ve always been somewhat surprised at how undervalued this landscape is. To me, it is one of the most fascinating biological communities in the US, containing plants that grow nowhere else save for maybe a few places in Northeastern Mexico. It does take a rather unenlightened approach to view this habitat as garbage, but view things like McDonalds and Walmart as precious. But the way around this kind of bunk values system is to attempt to slowly change the culture by showing it, not lecturing or shaming it, why such habitat is so freaking cool. How else will local residents realize what biological riches they are living amongst. Quite a few of them already do, but not nearly enough to guarantee that this habitat won’t all be gone or destroyed in thirty years. As it stands now, there is no large preserve anywhere in this region. I hope I live to one day see people here using and appreciating this landscape for botanizing/hiking/ exploring/ revering. I think of how cool it would be if there was something like a peyote preserve or a hiking trail with labels and ids on one member of each plant species for identification and education, to put things in context for the public and show them how invaluable the thornscrub is.
Maybe one day.
A HOTSPOT OF DIVERSITY and ENDEMISM IN SOUTH TEXAS
If you’re ever driving Highway 281 South of San Antonio, be sure to stop a lot. And if any of your passengers complain, threaten to leave them on the side of the road. This area, known colloquially as the “Texas Sandsheet” is a hotspot of quite a few plants that grow nowhere else in the world. As we’ve seen many times, a change-up in the geology or substrate of a given region offers a selection pressure for plants to speciate and for new species to evolve. We see this with serpentine, with gypsum, with bare limestone, and with….sand. These “Eolian” sands were deposited over millions of years from the Southeast and the nearby Gulf. Pictured above are some of the rarities that grow on this substrate. If you drive this area between March and August, when temps are the hottest (and most dangersous lol), you will be treated to some rarities and very beautiful, very cool plants that you won’t see if you’re speeding past them at 80 mph. This is the home of the (not yet blooming) Silverleaf Sunflower, Helianthus argophyllus, an annual sunflower with wooly leaves that resembles a Q-tip and which can grow to heights of 15’ in a single season. It has been hybridized with crop sunflowers in various regions to produce a more heat and drought tolerant sunflower. It’s an amazing plant and a beast and does well in cultivation. It’s seeds are also important as hell for migrating birds.