Growing Native with Petey Mesquitey

At one point when I was reading about the age of water I came across some research indicating that some of the water molecules we drink could be 4.6 billion years old. Yikes!

Eumorpha typhon or the typhon sphinx moth is out and about gathering nectar and sharing pollen from June to August in the borderlands.

I love books like this. It’s very much like having friends in the house.

So it seems some shrikes will move about seasonally to different elevations in the borderlands. Must be nice.

The kidneywood found in SE Arizona, SW New Mexico and down into Sonora is Eysenhardtia orthocarpa.

I originally wrote Borderlands Jaguar while driving up to Tucson to do a presentation for the Center for Biological Diversity...

Desert anemone (Anemone tuberosa) is in the Buttercup Family. Buttercups are the genus Ranuculus and so the family name is Ranunculaceae. It’s probably just me, but that is a marvelous family name to write and pronounce.

But listen, go native my friends, because we don’t need anymore non-native grasses in the desert, the grassland or the sky islands of the borderlands.

By the way, the word infundibula means funnel shaped, so the hollow pits as seen on the molars of our deer and give them their generic name, are funnel shaped. Maybe if you use your imagination.

The native grasses of southeastern Arizona are fun to learn. I’m not a botanist…hopefully that’s not a surprise…and so I learn them from friends, from floras or field guides and then sort of memorize them, their shape and their texture...Hmm, that's the way I learn all plants...