By Bill Ward
Published in The Boerne Star in August 2005
Last week Kathy and I experienced a second spring with cooler weather and lots of wildflowers. We were in southern Mexico in the mountains of Oaxaca at elevations of 7,000 to 10,000 feet. The state of Oaxaca has one of the most diverse floras in North America, and the summer rainy season brings out many kinds of blooming flowers, vines, and trees.
The “bluebonnets” (Lupinus sp.) reminded us of home, except the Oaxacan lupines are huge, more like the Big Bend bluebonnets. We saw a blue variety and a bluish-purple variety, some standing four feet high.
Another Hill Country-like plant that is blooming there this time of year is a mimosa. From the car it looked very much like our fragrant mimosa (Mimosa borealis), but close-up examination showed bigger leaves, stems, and flowers.
Patches of tall penstemons also brighten the mountain woods. One penstemon is scarlet red, and another, bright blue. These large penstemons are like a robust version of our Hill Country scarlet penstemon (Penstemon triflorus).
Oaxacan salvias are diverse in color and size. A particularly striking salvia in the area we visited is a two-foot-high species with large orange blooms.
The common nolina in those mountains is similar to our local devil’s shoestring (Nolina lindheimeriana). There are a multitude of other members of the agave family, most of which we had never seen before. The state of Oaxaca is supposed to have seven different species of century plants.
The rainy season is mushroom-gathering time, and the little markets in the mountain villages had local mushrooms for sale. Many different kinds of mushrooms were pushing up through the pine-needle floor of the pine-oak-madrone forest. Some of the orangish-red mushrooms were eight inches across.
Growing among the native plants that our amateur eyes could more or less identify were many, many more flowers, vines, bushes, trees, and ferns for which we hadn’t a clue. The Oaxacan mountains are a plant-lover’s paradise.
At lower elevations in some valleys are stands of Montezuma cypress (Taxodium mucronatum), similar to our bald cypress (T. distichum). Probably the largest Montezuma cypress in the world is at Santa Maria del Tule, east of Oaxaca City. According to a plaque at the site, this giant is 58 meters (190 feet) around, 14.05 m (46 ft) in diameter, 42 m (138 ft) tall, and over 2,000 years old. It makes the Texas state champ bald cypress in Real County and the slightly smaller one on Curry Creek in Kendall County look like saplings.
The area where this cypress grew used to be swampy with lots of cat-tails, and the church site near the giant cypress was called Santa Maria del Tule after the cat-tails (tules). Arbol del Tule (Tree of the Cat-tail) refers to the locality, not the type of tree.
Prickly pear cactus (Opuntia sp.) in Oaxaca commonly is inhabited by cochineal (Dactilpyus coccus), the same scale insect that makes the powdery white spots on prickly pear around Boerne. The female cochineal contains carminic acid, which is a source for red dye. In the early days of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, tons of cochineal were shipped to Europe to produce red dyes for clothing and tapestries. For a long time cochineal was the primary source of red dye and was among the most profitable exports of Mexico.
I always wondered how the Indians managed to gather so much cochineal from those spiny plants. We visited a little cochineal farm at Coyotecpec and saw that today the cochineal insects are cultivated on a succulent variety of spineless prickly pear. One doesn’t have to get stuck to gather cochineal these days.
