Our Window on Nature

One of the Southwest’s most attractive plants, the Sacred Datura, is also one of its most deadly. Every now and then newspapers carry the grisly story of someone who, after experimenting with a species of Datura, wanders for days through desert delusions until brought down by the searing heat. While seeking heavenly visions, the user ignored the possibility that he might be creating his own physical hell. For along with the hallucinogens, this plant packs a payload capable of ending the search.

Otherwise known as thorn apple and Indian apple, the Sacred Datura is closely related to jimsonweed and is part of the nightshade clan, a worldwide plant family encompassing both reputable and notorious members. The most famous of these are tomatoes, eggplants, hot and sweet peppers, and potatoes. Of course, these plants were also considered poisonous in the past. Datura favors the less beloved branch of the nightshade family, the one implicated in murder, witchcraft, seductions, and orgies. (Read the rest …)

Flagtail, marsh beetle, blackcap, water torch. Visit the shoreline of most lakes, rivers, marshes, and ponds, and you’ll see areas of these grasslike plants stretching as much as 10 feet high above the water. In some places they are called rushes, flags, or Cossack asparagus.

Names used by American Indians are just as descriptive: prairie chicken feathers, eye itch, and roof grass. Since the plant grows on nearly every continent and is native throughout the United States, this multiplicity of names is not surprising. Whether you call it candlewick, cat o’nine tails, or the more familiar cattail, the cattail plant is familiar to most people who venture outdoors.

Although we knew cattail marshes were a habitat for certain birds we chased with binoculars and a camera, we actually took a closer look at this familiar sight during our first year of full-timing. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to say, that’s when we had our first taste of this interesting plant.

One of our favorite books of the period was Stalking the Wild Asparagus by Euell Gibbons. It was our personal guide to eating our way across the country while avoiding fast-food restaurants. And it had an entire chapter on the edible cattail. In fact, Gibbons called it the “Supermarket of the Swamps.” (Read the rest …)

When we were kids in school, it was common knowledge that California’s redwoods were both the world’s oldest and its tallest trees, and that the earliest of them sprouted at about the time Jesus Christ was born. Then some wise guy discovered bristlecone pines of twice that age growing atop the barren peaks of California’s White Mountains, and we had to revise our thinking about longevity.

Now another researcher from the Golden State has thrown us a curve. Dr. Frank C. Vasek of the University of California at Riverside claims to have found a new “oldest living organism on earth” growing in the Mojave desert — only this time, it’s a bush.

Travel through the Chihuahuan, Sonoran, and Mojave deserts from Big Bend National Park to Joshua Tree National Monument, and the most common form of vegetation that you’ll find outside your window is the creosote. This bush thrives at below sea level in Death Valley. It grows where nothing else will, in the desiccated plains surrounding Yuma, where there is a miserly three inches of rainfall a year. Creosote even tolerates being buried by sand dunes, as long as it can grow fast enough to keep a few branches poking up through the sand. In short, this plant is a survivor.

It was at least 11,700 years ago that the American Southwest turned into a desert as we know it. The last Ice Age ended, the climate warmed and dried, and conditions were ready for new forms of vegetation. Creosote was the first plant to inhabit the desert terrain, and since the oldest creosote is estimated to be 11,700 years of age, we must have had deserts around for at least that long.

(That makes the oldest living creosote twice the age of the oldest bristlecone. Sound familiar?) (Read the rest …)

This country is not only peopled by immigrants, but it’s vegetated by them as well. A high percentage of the plants you see when traveling across the North American continent are actually non-natives.

The seeds of these first exotics, as they’re called, arrived right along with the explorers and colonists. Some were intentional imports; others weren’t. Grasses such as timothy, crabgrass, and ryegrass were used to feed cattle. Wild parsley and chickory were used for food, while foxglove, coltsfoot, and tansy served medicinal purposes. Other plants were brought for their beauty, in an effort to ease the loneliness of life in a new land.

A couple of centuries later, botanist J.M. Fogg found that 14 percent of the plants listed in Gray’s Manual of Botany - more than 1,000 species in all - were introduced.

Not all of these non-native species came as invited guests, of course. Many crossed the ocean attached to the clothes of the colonists or to the fur of their animals. In his book North With The Spring, naturalist Edwin Way Teale points out an example of how it can happen. (Read the rest …)

Botanists rely on Latin names for plants to avoid confusion, since the flora they work with contains thousands of species, some of them common to many different lands. But it also strips away most of the romance. Would you be as interested in the appearance of a Houstonia caerulea as you might be about seeing a quaker-lady? Or does the pompous sound of Saponaria officinalis delight your ears as much as its other name, bouncing bet? Probably not.

So after we concede the absolute and concrete necessity of a system of scientific nomenclature, we intend to devote this column to more engaging - and colorful - names for our North American wildflowers.

Some herbs get their names simply to describe a part of the plant. For example, you would expect an umbrella-leaf to have leaves shaped like an umbrella — it does. And you’d expect the leaves of the birdfoot violet to be many lobed — they are. Anyone who has seen a beavertail or a fishook cactus recognizes immediately the source of the name. But so far none of them relates to the flower. (Read the rest …)