Growing Native with Petey Mesquitey

It’s spring in the borderlands and something florally is going on and it’s going on everywhere. What a hoot! And…

I started my nursery/horticulture career in the spring of 1980 at Desert Trees Nursery northwest of Tucson. It was and…

It’s pretty hard to go wrong no matter which way you head into the borderlands of southeastern Arizona. On the day that we turned west instead of east onto the blacktop near our home and headed towards the Dragoon Mountains the adventure began.

The photos are mine of flowering Ceanothus greggii (desert buckbrush) and taken in the Dragoons where biotic communities clash.

Bristlehead (Carphochaete bigelovii) is a small shrub…a subshrub…that I’m not sure I would have recognized without the flowers and bristles. I wonder if I’ve wandered by this species many times before wondering what the heck it was. The flowers and bristles that helped my ID are contained in a very cool looking long involucre and I read that the throats of the flowers are “purplish” and the petals are white which may explain my fumbling over the color of the flowers...maybe.

Anyway, a really nice native plant common in the borderlands and especially common if you recognize it.

The photos are mine and taken on a windy spring day.

Just a couple things about this episode; the genus Linaria has been assigned to the European or Eurasian species of toadflax and Nuttallanthus is the genus for our North American toadflax…a whopping three species. Oh, and I suspect the common name toadflax is used for other plants as well, but why make things more confusing? Speaking of which, there are two species of toadflax in Arizona, but only one native. The other species is the exotic called butter and eggs or Linaria vulgaris. It sure is a pretty plant, looking like a bright yellow snapdragon, but no it’s a varmint. I yanked some up in the Chiricahua National Monument a few years ago. I was sure some passing tourists were going to turn me in, so I skedaddled before I was caught with an exotic weed.

Lemme see, is that more than a couple things? Well, one more; the botanical family Plantaginaceae makes me think of the royal dynasty Plantagenet… a good high school education is a terrible thing to waste.

The photos are mine and taken at Toadflax Acres.

Our one flowering wildflower on this wonderful day was the pretty perennial called penny cress or candy tufts. It is the former Thlaspi fendleri, but is now Nocceae fendleri. That’s my photo of the plant and it doesn’t do the plant justice. If you get a chance, you should look it up at the web site SEINet.

Alligator bark juniper apparently is an old common name. Now a days it is simply alligator juniper. I’m now up to date, but after seeing all those male juniper plants getting ready to explode with pollen I’m thinking it could be called “pollengator juniper.”  (check out my photo below...yikes!) The botanical name is still Juniperus deppeana and alleluia to that.

In central Texas and the land of Juniperus ashei folks suffer terribly from the pollen and call their suffering cedar fever. We’ve been in Santa Fe when the Juniperus monosperma were releasing their pollen making much of the populace quite miserable. I don’t remember anyone having a name for their misery, but we heard many nasally profanities during our stay.

Do I talk about dock every late winter and early spring? It sure seems like I do. Well, it's truly the first green plant one sees as winter ends and maybe that’s why I get so excited about it. Green!

There are 15 species of Rumex found in Arizona, some of which are introduced exotic species. Rumex hymenospepalus is found all over the state below 6,000 feet and it emerges in late winter and is blooming by early spring.

Rumex is the Latin word for docks or sorrels. If you grow sorrel in your herb garden then you have a Rumex species and as near as I can figure the only difference between docks and sorrels is that sorrels are smaller. Hmm, that's not a botanical description.

We love finding grinding holes in rocks when out traipsing in the wild. One of our favorite destinations when we lived in Tucson was the Coyote Mountains west of town. There was spot in one of the canyons where we found grinding holes and it became a family and friends gathering place. “Let’s meet at grinding hole rock.”

You can find grinding holes in rocks all over southern Arizona and they are such a wonderful reminder of the people that lived here centuries before you and me. I love to stand by them taking in the view and imagining the lives of people who were once there and no doubt taking in the view.

The photos are mine of the wild dock and that’s Ms Mesquitey with our dog Burley. I can’t remember the grinding hole count in that boulder covered kitchen…17 or 18? The snake she exclaimed about was a blacktailed rattlesnake skedaddling as they like to do.

Yet another love affair with an Arizona native plant. It could change next week and I’ll be in love with a new native plant, but listen, I got my first legitimate horticulture gig in the spring of 1980 (legitimate as in not pot, but landscape plants) at a wholesale nursery northwest of Tucson. At that wonderful nursery that gave a job to a “desperate for a job” fellow we grew the plant called desert spoon or Dasylirion wheeleri. Fast forward 40 or more years and I was working a few days a week for a large wholesale grower out in Cochise County, AZ where we grew thousands of desert spoons. I think it’s one of the hardest working native plants in southwestern horticulture and landscapes.

The genus name Dasylirion is a combination of two Greek words and translates to “a coarse, shaggy or rough (your choice!) lily.” In my excitement while jabbering I said “white” lily…but no just lily. Still a fairly good band name though; The Coarse Lilies. I think the common name desert spoon comes from the fact that the base of a sharp toothy leaf, where it attaches to the trunk, looks like a spoon when dry. Maybe if you’re on drugs. I dunno, I may be making that up too.

I mentioned Dasylirion leiophyllum in southwest NM and into west Texas, but neglected to give a shout out to Dasylirion texanum. And oh boy, the species of Dasylirion increase when you head south into Mexico. Yay!

The photos are mine and taken in the Dos Cabezas Mountains.

In the early 1990s when this story and song came about I was poking around the West Branch starting at Ajo Road and north almost to Starr Pass where I worked at Desert Survivors Nursery. It actually starts near Irvington Road and it meanders through a lot of private property, so you just can’t go wandering along it like a certain naive plant geek did back then. Yikes, I wish someone had told me! Anyway, I still love singing this song and thank you so much for listening.

 

 

There are some cool flora and fauna found on the west branch, so it might be fun for you to do a search on line for the West Branch of the Santa Cruz…recommended.

Come on blue dicks and come on spring!

Oh, while figuring out that the genus Dichelostemma translates as “a garland which is twice-parted to the middle,” I also discovered that the name was created by the German botanist Karl Sigismund Kunth. He did the botany of all the plants that the explorers Alexander Von Humbolt and Aimé Jacques Alexandre Bonpland brought back from their 1799 to1804 explorations of Central and South America. That’s 3,600 new species! I also learned that when naming species, Kunth paid “special attention to minute analysis of floral structures.” I’ll say.

The photos are from SEINet and taken by Max Licher. A big thank you to him.