Growing Native with Petey Mesquitey

The Apache fox squirrel – one of a few common names, but always Sciurus nayaritensis…is found in the Sierra Madre Occidental from Nayarit and north all the way to the Chiricahua Mountains where Ms. Mesquitey and I can be found poking around looking at local flora and fauna. The photos are mine.

This is an episode about hearing my heart beat. I initially was going to talk about the noise made by ORVs, ATVs, SUVs and pickup trucks out in the deserts and hills. I fall in the “pickup truck” category. Don’t want you thinking I’m a holier than thou sorta guy…ha! Anyway, guess I’ll pontificate about all that another time. You’re welcome. So, this is an episode about hearing my heart beat while hanging out on a rocky slope in the Galiuro Mountains. The photos are mine.

Monarda species are endemic to North America. As near as I can figure there are fifteen or sixteen species and four of those are found in Arizona. Yay! Monarda fistulosa spp. menthifolia would be a wonderful addition to a high desert landscape…did you hear me say in it grew in pine forests? We’re talking shade, so under a tree or shrub that will get an extra drink. Oh yeah!  And, it’s pretty special to see it in the wild blooming in those shady pine forests from June to September. The photos are mine.

Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) is found from central California, up through the Pacific Northwest, throughout the Rockies (variety glauca) and southward down into our sky islands. We are so lucky to have it as a part of the mixed coniferous forests in the mountains of the borderlands. What a magnificent tree! I highly recommend reading about its ecology and history..a small assignment. The photos are mine and taken the day of our tree hunt. That’s Marian…Ms. Mesquitey… looking over the other side of that deadfall and finding a Douglas fir.

I’ve written a lot of episodes about sycamore trees over the years. Below are some of the things I wrote for  those episodes. “I could look at sycamores all day. They remind me of when I was a kid in Kentucky and the huge sycamores we climbed along the creeks back there. Some big ones were hollow and you could go in them! It was a different species…Platanus occidentalis…this one is P. wrightii.” “Sycamores are the genus Platanus, which was the old Greek name for the tree that is the species Platanus orientalis. There are five or six species found…

I use the common name wild cotton, but here are some other common names: Thurber’s cotton, desert cotton, and algodoncillo. Your choice, but if in doubt try Gossypium thurberi. I think it’s interesting that in the Southwestern US Gossypium thurberi occurs only in Arizona, but then, southward across the border into the Mexican states of Sonora, Chihuahua and Jalisco. The photos are mine and of an illustration by Lucretia Breazeale Hamilton taken from Benson and Darrow’s Plants of the Southwest Deserts. Her beautiful illustrations are found in so many of my favorite plant books. And yes, that’s my shadow in…

It was Carl Linnaeus, the king of binomial nomenclature, who decided to use the classical Latin name fraxinus as the genus for ash trees. One hundred years later the American botanist John Torrey gave the species name velutina to the tree I’m talking about in this episode; Fraxinus velutina or velvet ash. There are sixty-five to seventy species of Fraxinus found around the world. Seven of those species are found in Arizona, so hey, collect them all! The photos are mine of velvet ash along our driveway and in fall color.

Talking about desert broom (Baccharis sarothroides) is a November tradition and so is singing an old hymn that I like to play with. The melody of the song has had quite a journey from a Dutch folk song of the early 1600s to the early 1800s when Eduard Kremser wrote the hymn using the melody. The Kremser starts with the line “We gather together.” I love the line in the song, “the wicked oppressing now cease from distressing.” I hope it’s a great season of friends and family for all of us. Celebrations full of laughter, maybe tears, but all…

I loved sitting in that grassland and warming up with a rising sun. Is there anything better than sitting quietly and watching the natural world around you? I’m pretty sure this can be done in a back yard or a park or maybe a little farther out in the desert or nearby hills. And hey, you don’t need to be hunting and gathering. With frozen fingers I was able to take the photo of wooly bunchgrass (Elionurus barbiculmis) on the morning described in this episode.

It was the American botanist Soreno Watson, who was on the receiving end of the Lemmon’s collections, that named the onion collected in the Huachuca Mountains to honor Sara Plummer Lemmon. He made no mistake who it honored by using her maiden name and thus the botanical Allium plummerae. Common names are Tanner’s Canyon onion, Plummer’s onion or around our place we call it Sara’s onion. I thought I had some photos of Sara’s onion taken at Onion Saddle in the Chiricahuas, but couldn’t find them. Why do I think they’re 35 mm slides? Well, instead I offer the cover…