I originally wrote and recorded the song Road Across the Grassland in 2005…well, maybe a little before, but listen, there really is a dirt road that starts about three miles from our home and that road will take you across grassland, through desert scrub and woodland and right to the Mexican border. I love it…I’m guessing you knew that. Thank you so much for listening all these many years and Happy New Year!

If I had wobbled up any higher on that rocky slope I may or may have not fallen by a ragged rock flower. It ranges from 1,800 ft to 4,500 ft in elevation across southern Arizona. I found a wonderful line in the plant description found at the site SEINet; “An unassuming plant with attractive flowers, often growing in out of the way places.” Sweet….also some photos of Crossosoma bigelovii can be found at that site. The photo used here is mine taken of Lucretia Breazeale Hamilton’s drawing in a favorite book of mine called Trees and Shrubs of the…

There are sixty-five to seventy species of Fraxinus found around the world, so of course ancient Romans had a name for ash trees. Carl Linnaeus, the king of binomial nomenclature, used the classical Latin name fraxinus as the genus for ash trees and one hundred years later the American botanist John Torrey gave the species name velutina to the tree I’m jabbering about in this episode, Fraxinus velutina or velvet ash. Seven species of ash are found in Arizona and most if not all can be found in the horticulture trade. That’s awesome, so hey, collect them all! The photos…

What a fun discovery in the desert east of Douglas, Arizona. There is just something about these large spinescent shrubs in the buckthorn family, Rhamnaceae. I love Condalia warnockii and friends who frequent the western deserts of Arizona love Condalia globosa…okay, me too. And now I’m adding Condalia correllii to my favorite spinescent shrub list. And hey, it was a guess, but yes the specific epithet correlli is named for botanist Donovan Stewart Correll. Oh, and as far as my jokingly pondering whether Antonio Condal and Jean Pierre Florens knew of one another… only if either one could time travel.

Leslie Newton Goodding had a busy career. It was when he worked for the U. S. Department of Agriculture that he collected the type specimen for the willow jabbered about in this episode. It was the American botanist Carleton Roy Ball, a Salix specialist (geek), who honored Goodding with the species name. One of the things that caught my attention when reading about Leslie Goodding was that at some point he taught High School in Bisbee, as well as Benson. I bet those teaching gigs supported his plant explorations around southern Arizona. There are a bunch of Salix species in…

All the plants and their communities I was excitedly jabbering about are in the borderlands year round, but the sandhill cranes are only here for the winter months. You can google sandhill cranes and come up with some places to see them out in Cochise County. Here’s a  few places where we look for them: the Whitewater Draw is probably the best known and a great spot, but you can also see cranes at the Willcox Playa off Kansas Settlement Road or off Highway 191 north of Dragoon Road near the power plant…there’s a sign saying “Wildlife Viewing.” A spot…

When Ms. Mesquitey and I gather acorns to plant we bag up hundreds, but I can never resist nabbing a few if I see some still on an oak…thus the acorns in my pocket. It would be hard to go into a woodland or forest in southeastern Arizona and not see acorn woodpeckers (Melanerpes formicivorus) or Mexican jays (Aphelocoma ultramarina)…they are quite common, but quite wonderful. The photos are mine. The acorn woodpecker riddled trunk is horizontal, because the pine tree had fallen and was laying across the forest floor. Can you believe all the holes?! The jay was curious…

It’s fun to have favorite plants to look for on excursions into the hills. Looking back at photos and my notes, we have been checking on this particular population of Lemmon’s milkweed for a few years. I’m guessing that as long as we’re in the area, we’ll continue to stop by for a visit. And yes, I did grab a couple seed pods (follicles) from a plant. Stay tuned. Botanical names of plants are usually followed by the name of who named it…the author citation. The genus Asclepias is followed by an L. That’s Linnaeus. And if one looked through…

The American botanist Soreno Watson, named the onion collected in Tanner’s Canyon of the Huachuca Mountains to honor Sara Plummer Lemmon. He made no mistake who it honored by using her maiden name Plummer and so we have Allium plummerae. Common names of this borderlands’ native are Tanner’s Canyon onion or Plummer’s onion.  Around our place we call it Sara’s onion. The photos are mine. The onion pics were taken just above Onion Saddle in the Chiricahua Mountain. The books came off my shelf.  Wynne Brown is local and wonderful.

The original version of the “El Niño Song” aired on KXCI, Tucson’s Community Radio, November 28th 1997. That version can also be found on The Best of Growing Native Volume 1, (a real collector’s item). Now you know. So here’s to a wet winter and maybe… just maybe… some crazy spring wildflowers!