Growing Native with Petey Mesquitey

I neglected to mention that milkweeds are no longer in their own family Asclepiadaceae, but have now been included in…

I love the way you see flame flower's orange or yellow flowers out in the grassland in the heat of the day.

I love this description of San Miguelito from the botanist Ira Wiggins in the Flora of Baja California: A “scrambling perennial herbaceous vine from a slightly woody base.”

Dodonaea viscosa is found from central and southern Arizona down into South America and the West Indies. The further south you go the varieties are less cold hardy and desert hardy, so ours is the perfect evergreen shrub for landscapes in the borderlands that range from 2,000’ to 4,000’ in elevation. It makes sense right? It’s native.

I’m thinking all plants and animals need a festival in their honor, so why not Isocoma tenuisecta right?

The name Tecoma is an abbreviation of the Nahuatl word tecomaxochitl.

This could be a good project for someone wanting a graduate degree: clarifying how many species of Sapindus there are in the world. One of the requirements for this research would be ability to enjoy travel, because you will be all over the globe identifying soapberry trees in their diverse habitats.

But hey, isn’t it cool when rain cleans the slate and you can find new tracks to identify and follow.

For goodness sake, I forgot to mention the black-tailed jackrabbit’s ears! The large ears are magnificent parabolic reflectors that keep them well informed of anything approaching.

The scientific name of the ringtail is Bassariscus astutus. It’s in the Procyonidae, the same family as our local borderlands' critters the raccoons and coatis.