Adventures In Desert Botany
"West
beyond San Angelo is a strange country, so completely open and dry, so sandy,
gravelly, and scrubby as to qualify in most people's mind as a true
desert. But it is not an unappealing
land...."-- A C Greene, A Personal Country, New York, 1969
It is a shameful thing, I think, to stand on
your own land and to realize you can't name most of the plants you see growing
by your feet...
A few years back, I took it upon myself to
understand the plant life and climate of Tom Green County and its neighboring
counties in the western Concho Valley of Texas so I would feel less ignorant
when I stepped outside...
Luck would have it that I purchased a couple
of books several years earlier that helped briefly ease that sense of being a
know-nothing. They were part of the
Audubon series guides to various ecosystems found in the United States. Deserts,
written by James A MacMahon, a professor at Utah State University, proved
particularly useful and I could soon name quite a few of the forbs and shrubs
that I saw when wandered around...
Unfortunately, this truly wonderful guide had
one drawback-- Dr MacMahon summarized the flora, fauna, and geology of the four
vast North American deserts between its pages.
That meant, despite the several dozen plants I could now identify, a
truly vast number of the Chihuahuan Desert species in Southwest Texas were
omitted due to lack of space...
My next step was to motor into the metropolis
of San Angelo and buy several additional guides that focused specifically on
Texas wildflowers and shrubs. There were
no books that dealt solely with the Concho Valley but there were some
describing the flora found in the Trans-Pecos and the Rio Grande Plains, two of
the regions nearest the valley. I
suspected (rightly) that their regional proximity translated into a fairly
substantial overlap of plants which grew there and which grew where I lived...
Several of the guides dealt with Texas
wildflowers and range plants in general...
Thumbing through these books, I realized
fairly quickly that there are basically two types of wildflower guides. One sorts flowers by color. The other arranges them by their plant genera
and/or families. Each system has
advantages...
Beginning (and even advanced) wildflower
enthusiasts will be far less frustrated if they hope to identify a yellow
flower and can just look at a collection of pictures with dozens of yellow
flowers. Later, when a person realizes how
important the idea of familes (and the shared characteristics of its members)
are when it comes to identifying an unknown plant, he or she will probably also
want a guide organized along those lines as well...
[Buying a guidebook can be a very useful step
in identifying local plants. The
downside is that the vegetation and flowers we encounter often fail to resemble
the pictures in the book. On the upside,
a good guidebook may have a glossary or pictorial charts that will summarize
most of the basic botany we really ought to know before we wander around
nearby deserts or forests or prairies-- monocots vs dicots, leaf arrangement and leaf shapes,
flower parts, overall plant form, difference between trees and shrubs and
herbs, perennial plants vs annual plants, fruit types, the importance of
taxonomy (particularly families, genera, and species when faced with a specimen
that really wants to play hard to identify), etc. A really good guidebook may also have rulers
printed on its end pages in both inches and centimeters and fractions thereof) so we can determine a
leaf's length or a flower's width.]
Plant buffs, incidentally, can generate a
relatively complete list of the flora in their area provided they live in the
lower 48 United States and have access to high speed internet and possess both
time and patience to go through the 21,500 species records now in the Biota of
North America Program (BONAP) (http://www.bonap.org/). Although it may take several weeks to plow
through this rather easily understood database, the odds are that any list of
shrubs, forbs, and grasses which you generate for your county or parish will be
over 90% complete...
BONAP's databases also include climate maps
of all sorts which can help explain why a plant may thrive in one place and die
almost immediately less than fifty miles away...
[Distribution or range maps for individual species
are not always complete. There may be
several reasons for these gaps: the most likely is that a qualified expert has
yet to submit a specimen for inclusion in an officially recognized plant
collection. Some plants may be so common
that a collector simply overlooks them since they are everywhere the eye
sees.
Some of these gaps may be a bit amusing or
infuriating, depending on a person's point of view. The USDA database, for example, fails to list
both Prosopis glandulosa and Ziziphus
obtusifolia as present in Tom Green County, Texas, although it's probably
next to impossible to go more than 1000' in most parts of the county without
seeing either a mesquite or a lotebush or both of these common dry country shrubs.
My suspicion is there may be a slightly higher
percentage of "missed" or "overlooked" species in our western
and southwestern state counties since they are often sparsely populated and
infrequently visited, even by scientists with an interest in the region. A
little over 100,000 people live in Tom Green County, Texas, in an area a bit larger
than the state of Rhode Island-- and it is amongst the most populous counties
in all of southwestern Texas. Nearby
Crockett County, with 2807 square miles of land and 3719 people, would likely
offer even more opportunities for missing a species or two-- even if the
researcher is extremely thorough.]
Electronic resources can help us compile
useful lists even if we don't want to wade into the deep waters of BONAP's
massive database...
Among the first of many electronic resources
I discovered for my part of the country was the Handbook of Texas Online.
Being primarily interested in Tom Green County and its climate and
vegetation, I retrieved that entry, learning not to my surprise, that the
county was hot and dry with an average annual rainfall of 18.2 inches. The article contained a partial listing of shrubs
growing in Tom Green: mesquite, algerita, cat's claw, chapparal, yucca, prickly
pear, and other cacti as well as pecans on the Concho River banks and live and
shinnery and red oaks...
This list brings us to a minor challenge
facing all plant lovers regardless of their level of professional training: common
names versus scientific names...
Here in West Texas, a particular shrub may have
as many as five or six common names within as many miles. Algerita is also known as agarita (my
preference) or desert holly or agarito or currant-of-Texas or wild
currant. (Scientists simplify this
problem by calling it either Mahonia
trifoliata or Berberis trifoliata)...
Chapparal, I learned, is a variant spelling
for "chaparral" which, when the word is used to identify a specific
plant species, refers to the one called greasewood or little stinker or
hediondilla or coville or gobernadora or guamis or creosote bush, depending on
where a person happens to live in the southwestern desert county. Among academics, Larrea tridentata (or, rarely, Larrea
mexicana) provides a simpler set of names when it comes to discussing the
plant and its characteristics...
Other electronic searches, including one for
the Concho Valley, added to my list of local species...
I found references to early biological
surveys of the Concho Valley and that led to some comments made by naturalists
Vernon Bailey and Harry Oberholser in the last years of the 19th Century and
the first years of the 20th as they traveled through the area, listing the
plants and animals they encountered.
Bailey's remark that "San Angelo is an open mesquite plain in the
genuinely arid region. There are great
stretches with only smooth surfaces and little desert plants" brought a
smile to my face-- these words are as true in April 2013 as when he wrote them
in May 1899...
Obviously, more detailed analysis of the
western Concho Valley had taken place since Bailey and Oberholser said we'd
find wolfberry, ephedra, mimosa, redberry juniper, and javelina bush scattered around
the area...
Much of this information was online-- a soil
survey of "West Central Texas" from 1928, to cite one example,
mentioned tarbush, allthorn, and skunkbush sumac in addition to most of the
plants listed above. A map of Texas,
based on Environmental Protection Agency Level IV Ecoregions, repeated many of
the species which had already come to my attention, adding two more as I read
through the accompanying text that explained the map: lechuguilla and sotol...
All told, the results of my adventures in
desert botany have not been quite so dramatic as the events which overtook Ishmael,
Herman Melville's hapless narrator, who possessing little or no money in his
purse and owning even less interest in the ordinary lives of men along the
ocean's shore, thought to sail about and see the watery part of the world in
the company of the mad Ahab and the cannibal Queequeg, chief harpooner aboard
the Pequod in her doomed quest of a
white whale...
But these little adventures of mine, treks
into the desert with my camera to record what I see, have paid me well, slowly
giving me a much deeper understanding of the nature of the hard and dry country
where I live along with a dividend of a greater knowledge of the plants that
sporadically dot its surface...
In briefly talking about my search, I have
another agenda, of course: to offer some hints for those readers who wish to
know more about the flora and fauna of their own areas. Many of the things I've learned were not
learned the easy way but, because I do not sit not under oath in a courtroom, I
can leave the reader with the impression that I wisely charted my course
through the sandy and empty country, planning out each step of my adventures in
desert botany, and did not simply jump into deep caliche feet first...
Test your skills as a desert plant lover: Match the photographs with the common plant names. Two pictures will match with two plant names. Feather Dalea, Ocotillo, Tarbush, Prickly Pear Cactus, Angel Trumpets, Century Plant, Javelina Bush, San Angelo Yucca, Mariola, Saltbush, Mexican Hat.
THE
MARKETPLACE
One easy and inexpensive
way to build a collection of work by today's finest painters, sculptors, and
photographers: Greeting cards from Fine
Art America.
Easier still: browse the
Louis R Nugent gallery at Fine Art America.
Choose from 250+ unique ideas for home and office decor or holiday and
birthday cards for yourself or special someones who deserve something
extraordinary. Individual cards cost
less than $5. Wall prints from $22.
http://louis-nugent.artistwebsites.com/
 |
| Louis Nugent: Pink Gorilla and Green Building |
Follow and Like Louis R Nugent Photography on Facebook @ louisnugent22.
Fine Art America now
features painting, drawings, and photographs by 30 artists who celebrate
majestic and uncompromising landscapes, settlements, people, plants, and flora
and fauna scattered across the vast emptiness called West Texas and the
American Southwest.
http://fineartamerica.com/groups/west-texas.html
 |
| Karen Slagle: Autumn Light |
Fine Arts America now
features work celebrating the mysterious
and lovely Bayou State of Louisiana and its unique lifestyle:
http://fineartamerica.com/groups/cajun-country-louisiana.html
 |
| Ronald Olivier: Boiler Door |
Fine Arts America now
features work celebrating Art inspired by Art:
http://fineartamerica.com/groups/art-inspired-by-art.html
 |
| Sharon Cummings: Frida Kahlo Art-- Seeing |
CREDITS
Note:
Information for this essay is taken primarily from readily available sources
such as Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, and almanacs. When other sources are employed they are
credited either in the text or as follows:
none. All photographs are taken from Wikipedia or Google Images without source
or authorship credits available, except as noted: cover of The Deserts of the
Southwest by Peggy Larson from Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1977; cover of
Trees and Shrubs of the Trans-Pecos and Adjacent Regions by A Michael Powell
from University of Texas Press, Austin, 1998; all other photographs by Louis R
Nugent
