Thursday, May 2, 2013

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

No comments:

Post a Comment