Essays

Wild On The Prairie: Plants

What everybody ought to know about Mesquite
March 12, 2000; February 16, 2003

Sometimes when the staff of the Sibley Nature Center is on the trail with a group of children we stop and say, “How many of you kids are really West Texans? What is this bush?”

Usually the answer is, “It is a thorn bush.” Because that is the most common answer, we are reassured that we provide something to the citizens of Midland. Every child should know the name of the most common “tree” of the region in which he or she resides. How can a child be a West Texan and not know the name?

There are a thousand stories about mesquite. Some people hate it and poison it with chemicals. Some people love the wood for its rich,dark hardness and use it for for gun butts, clocks, tables, or rolling pins. Others love it for the flavor it adds to grilled foods.

Some folktales about mesquite are repeated as fact. “Mesquite came here with cattle,” is a belief that masquerades as knowledge. “The Spanish brought it from South America (or at least from Mexico).” But, At every Indian campsite there is proof that mesquite has been here for centuries. Eunice Barkes, a Midland archaeologist, found mesquite charcoal dating from the 1100’s at a burnt rock site near what is now Trinity School. In the Florrisant Fossil Beds in Colorado, scientists have dated fossilized mesquite leaves to 75 million years ago.

Fires started by Native Americans or natural lightning burned many sites on the Llano Estacado at least once a decade. Five million buffalo the Llano roamed from the Canadian River to the Concho River and the huge animals stomped any scrawny mesquite seedlings that managed to escape the fires en masse every time a herd passed by. During the time of the buffalo prairie, mesquite was only able to grow to substantial size in draws and playas with shallow water tables where fires were slowed by damp soils and vegetation.

In the first drought after cattlemen began stocking the land, the cattle overgrazed the buffalo prairie. The cattle ate any mesquite bean that could be found, and in the resulting cow patties the mesquite seeds found ideal conditions for germination. Surrounded by moist fertilizer and close to bare ground, the seedlings germinated miles from the parent plant.

The early day cattlemen hated prairie dogs (for the broken legs of running horses and cattle) and killed millions. Prairie dogs controlled mesquite seedlings on the buffalo prairie. Within fifty years, most of the buffalo prairie became covered with mesquite bushes. The natural controls of mesquite -- fire and grazing by prairie dogs had been eliminated.

The Sibley Nature Center has a two foot diameter mesquite trunk cut to display the rings of the wood (which are so close together that the separate rings are mostly indistinguishable). The specimen came from a hill overlooking a large salt playa, Peck’s Lake. The only naturally occurring surface water in Midland County is a spring which rises a quarter of a mile from where the old mesquite once grew.

Maybe someday a generous benefactor will pay to send a piece of this cross section to a dendrological laboratory to determine the date of its germination. Sibley’s staff knows of another site with a mesquite of similar size which might provide a comparison in formulating a hypothesis concerning the age of our specimen.

The other mesquite grows on the roadbed of the old Fasken Railway along the highway to Gardendale, Goldsmith, Notrees, and points west. Since the railroad was abandoned in the 1920’s, perhaps the Sibley specimen is also around 80 years old as well. The soil types of the two locations, however, are very, very different. The Peck’s Lake specimen was on a gravelly caliche hillside – a much more xeric location - and therefore, probably grew much more slowly.

If you have read this far, you may be thinking, “What insignificant, provincial trivia!” Or, “Wow, the folks out at Sibley know their stuff.” Well, we do know a little, but we are always learning as much as we can. We love the Llano Estacado. It is our home.

If you believe that knowledge of the local ecology is trivial, it is possible that no natural place will feel like home to you. When we live in modern, urban environments, we can come to believe the myth that we are not affected by local ecological conditions. We can delude ourselves into believing Midland is a self-contained space colony with its food, energy, and water shipped in from afar, unattached and unrelated to the local environment.

Believing in this myth makes it easy to hate one’s homeland. Many people who live in West Texas deride the Llano Estacado as flat, brown, dreary, and ugly. Mesquite becomes a symbol of the hate. “Do not go in a vacant lot and play near those nasty thornbushes,” mamas tell their children. “Stay inside, out of the heat, away from the snakes and stickerburs.”

Mesquite is often hated by ranchers as well. “Durn ‘brush’,” they call it. “It sucks up all the rain water, and does not let grass grow.” Along the North Concho River, the Soil Conservation Service (now the Natural Resources Conservation Service) used federal money to help ranchers eradicate mesquite in long strips. The remaining mesquite was intended to provide wildlife cover, and to prevent wind erosion. Dried-up springs began running again after the removal of 50 percent of the mesquite.

Yet other ranchers like mesquite. “Look under the little trees- the grass stays greener longer, and better quality species grow there. The leaves and beans of the plant put nitrogen into the soil - and since it is a legume, it probably has nitrogen-fixing nodules on the roots. It would be stupid to kill a natural fertilizer factory.”

One researcher found that soil moisture increased near the tap and lateral roots of mesquite. This moisture was present even in a very dry season. This fact suggests a very interesting possibility – can mesquite absorb moisture from the atmosphere, and transport it to the root zone?

There is an old saying in mesquite country: “Mesquite does not leaf out in the spring until after the last frost.” Like most folk sayings, it contains quite a bit of truth. Most years the saying holds true. Every once in a while, though, a late cold front blasts in and four inches of snow suddenly adorn fully-leafed mesquites.

We have only begun to explore the subject of mesquite.