It's All Mesquite to Me

Cows wander through it

Normal winter temperatures have returned: at night the air here in Dos Cabezas plunges below freezing and by day barely makes it into the 50s, making it much more like the winter we remember from three years ago. We keep the cabin warm with a propane heater and are comfortable indoors night and day, but when I go outside with Sarah, I leave the warmth  reluctantly. I put on jacket and hat and mittens, and on a still morning, walking into the west, I feel chill air on my face, even without a noticeable breeze. And yet — I also feel the sun on my back, and the sun feels warm, warm despite the chilly air, and I relax into my walk, losing any sense of hurry to get back indoors. 

Someone should put together a book of southeast Arizona desert vegetation in winter. This tree by the wash, 15-20 feet in height, with multiple trunks and with a tangled nest of twig-like branches bristling (so many desert plants “bristle,” in one way or another) with small dark orange berries — what is it? The book I have consulted on Arizona plants is very complete as far as it goes, explaining the Latin names, giving economic uses for plants and listing animals that feed on them, and showing photographs of entire trees in full leaf and line drawings of those characteristic leaves. But what do they look like now, in winter, bare of leaves and yet full of last season’s fruit? That’s what I need to know! 

My best guess for the tree in the pictures above is netleaf hackberry, Celtis reticulata, a member of the elm family not at all reminiscent of the stately American elm of the Midwest. My source says:

This hackberry occurs as a small tree, up to 30 feet tall and less than 1 foot in diameter, generally. It grows along dry washes, desert grasslands and river valleys.... Its characteristically scraggly appearance develops because several feet of new growth occur on only a few limbs during years of adequate water.... 

-- from Woody Plants of the Southwest: A Field Guide with Descriptive Text, Drawings, Range Maps and Photographs, by Samuel H. Lamb. Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 1989

Anyone else want to weigh in?

Then there are the grasses and brooms and other ground plants. There are half a dozen only a few steps from the cabin door, but identifying them in books from their winter appearance is beyond my capability.

As for the many brittle hardwood shrub-like plants, branches alive and, yes, bristling with thorns, they are all “mesquite” to me, though I know there is more than one species and probably more than one genus here in the ghost town. There is even, I find in the plant book, more than one “catclaw”! There are catclaw mesquite and catclaw mimosa. (And no, spelling program, I do not mean “catcall,” so please stop “correcting” my spelling!”) Those I think I could tell apart by their long, pea-like seed pods, similar but distinctive. Both are in the legume family (as are all the mesquites), but the mimosa pods curl. Three years ago I had quite a collection of dry seed pods. This year I can't find a single one near the cabin. Was the drought so severe and food so scarce that cattle and deer ate them all? Perhaps there is another explanation, but I have no idea what it might be.

There was a photo of a small oak in my account of our most recent drive through the Stockton Pass in the Pinaleno Mountains, but learning the various Arizona oaks is a project requiring more ambition than I possess in that direction. Often, whether it’s a question of a tree, a wildflower, or a bird, I’m satisfied if I can mentally attach to it the correct genus. Often, but not always. The sparrows (like warblers, so numerous, various, and confusing!) challenge me to greater efforts. Just the other day I came in from a walk to consult the bird book and felt triumphant when I was able to identify a bird I had seen in the wash as a black-throated sparrow. Understand — black-throated sparrows are far from rare: the book says it is “Arizona’s most widespread and numerous breeding sparrow” (Birds of Southeast Arizona, by Richard Cachor Taylor [Olympia, WA: R. W. Morse Co., 2010). So my sighting, if I want to give seeing the bird a fancy name, is no great event. It’s nothing like seeing, three years ago, the hooded oriole here in Dos Cabezas or the vermilion flycatcher in Willcox. It’s not even as exciting, objectively speaking, as the little loggerhead shrike I saw out at Twin Ponds our first winter here. 

Vermilion flycatcher, Willcox, AZ, 2015

But that’s just it, don’t you see? Excitement has nothing to do with objectivity. My little sparrow triumph made me happy. I’ll go further. I would not give up my excitement over ordinary events for all the objectivity in the world! Do I “romanticize” my life? (I have been accused of that more than once.) Well, if I don’t, who will? And if I were to stop, what would I gain?

“Horses! Look, horses!”  Well, why in the world would I ever want to give up the joy I feel at the very sight of them? Let others shrug and roll their eyes and twist their mouths into disdainful, supercilious looks. Their hearts are not swelling with happiness! How would the world be better if any of us were to feel less happiness on a daily basis?

As for the mesquite and all the other dark, unremarkable, bare-branched plants I see every day on the high desert floor, while I regret the way they have overtaken so many square miles, replacing more diverse vegetation suitable to grazing and browsing, and while I would love to see the high desert grassland reclaimed and flourishing, rather than simply used up, it’s also true that as I look out over this scrubby, scruffy, poor, eroded, overgrazed land, I feel an irresistible and growing affection for it just the way it is. The plants and animals here, from mesquite and cow to cholla and packrat, are only doing what every plant and animal species does, including human beings: they’re trying to make a living in the place circumstance has placed them, and we’re all here now, trying to find ways to live together. 

Now, finally, early, early this morning, for the first time this year we heard the familiar chorus of coyote song, a sound we heard often during our first stay three years ago. Arizona is not Michigan, and the ghost town cabin we call home here is not our country farmhouse in Leelanau County, but the coyotes sound the same both places. They sound like home.

I believe this cholla to be Tasajo

A Berry Obsession, Part II, or, Hawthorns, Continued

(If you missed Part I, you can find it here.)

More like it! In the line drawing of hawthorn above, from Illustrated Guide to Trees and Shrubs, by Arthur Marmount Graves, published by the author in 1952, look at those leaf edges with their nicely rounded lobes! The fruits look flatter than mine, more like blueberries in form, but this is a generic drawing, not meant to represent exactly a particular species. Next, in Avril Rodway’s Wild Foods (1988), with illustrations by Zane Carey, I found another promising line drawing:


Wild Foods also has full-page color illustrations, and here are a couple details from the hawthorn page, looking very like my specimens.



Finally—wow!—Field Book of American Trees and Shrubs, by F. Schuyler Mathews, published by Putnam’s with an author’s copyright date of 1915, gives a dizzying array of hawthorns, beginning on page 211 and going through page 253, although this is only a sampling, according to Mathews, who begins his introduction to hawthorns as follows:

An extremely difficult and complex genus separated by botanists into many divisions comprehending about 200 species. The subtle distinctions of leaf-form, anther-color, number of stamens, and character of fruit, etc., are more or less precarious....

A visit from my botany guru, Chris Garthe of the Leelanau Conservation District, however, confirmed that my leaf and berry samples--and we can now refer to the berries as haws--are definitely hawthorn. I showed him my photo of the little tree, too, which nicely conforms to the description given by Mathews:

The Hawthorns are mostly flat-topped trees, irregular in limb and branch, the shrubby form generally showing ascending and the tree form spreading branches, but no rule is possible in this direction.

“No general rule” seems to be the general rule for hawthorns. Is this why I love them, other than their having been featured in the first volume of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past? That’s where my initial obsession with hawthorn trees began.

[Pause while bookseller combs house from stem to stern, searching for first volume of Proust. Does not find. Only final volume surfaces. Must go to press without relevant literary quote here. Rats!]

Hawthorns go back centuries in the Old Country, whether in France, England or Ireland. Sometimes fairies figure into the lore, but legends of all kinds abound. Here is a paragraph from Rodway:

The Holy Thorn . . . at Glastonbury in the west of England, which legend has it, sprang from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea, blooms in winter – on Christmas Day, or near it – and cuttings from it flourish in both Britain and America. In fact, reverence for the hawthorn has crossed the Atlantic and many of the same feelings for the tree exist in both Britain and the United States.

(The reason for my ellipsis in the paragraph quoted above is that Carey writes of the "Crataegus family," and there is no such family. Crataegus is a genus within the family Rosaceae).

Now for the disappointing news. Chris and I tasted a couple of haws.


The texture is mealy, taste bland, and each little haw contains a big, hard pit. Turning to new books, I find in Tree & Shrub Gardening for Michigan, by Tim Wood & Alison Beck (Lone Pine, 2003), I find this notation:

Hawthorn fruits are edible but dry and seedy. Some people make jelly from them, or ferment them and mix them with brandy.

Before I tasted the haws, I had imagined making jelly, but now I think I’ll leave them for the wildlife. Anyway, I enjoyed the collecting, the mystery, the literature search and finding a solution. That was plenty of satisfaction for a November day.