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No, this isn’t an obituary for someone’s dear Aunt Flora from Floresville. We’re talking about the flora that has a longterm relationship with fauna. So read on, please, with only a hint of sadness here and there.
Now, as we know all too well, death lurks wherever we turn. Family members and friends die, and we mourn, either alone weeping burning tears, or in a crowd surrounded by loved ones. Favorite pets have even shorter lifespans (unless you keep a couple Galapagos tortoises in your back yard), and we also miss them when they’re gone, even if we don’t normally take them to church for a funeral. Road kill turns beautiful animals like deer and foxes into ugly, bloody messes.
Then again, death sustains us. Death in the slaughterhouse brings meat to the table. And even vegetarians depend on the death of living things to support life. Plants die, or all human and animal and even other plant life disappears.
We seldom pause to reflect on the fact that most human food comes from annuals: grasses like rice, corn, wheat, and barley; legumes like beans and peas; green vegetables like spinach, broccoli, and lettuce; nutritious roots like carrots, potatoes, and turnips. Once they are harvested, the whole plant is dead, dead, dead. But, since they are just annuals, they would be dead anyway, so, no guilt trip there. Just save some seeds, thank you very much.
Some plants only give up part of themselves every year and live on indefinitely. We think of deciduous trees that lose their leaves every fall and then dress up again in the finest greenery come springtime. And, although providing only a small percentage of the total food supply, certain trees yield abundant harvests of fruit and nuts, and sometimes even the leaves themselves, for our eating enjoyment.
So far, we have said almost zilch about our treasured Texas native plants. That’s because, sorry to say, they prove pitifully inadequate for feeding an ever-growing (so far, at least) population. One major exception: native grasses provide, through grazing animals, some, but still not the majority, of our meat supply. In fact, as we sadly note, much, if not most, of the original native plant community in our state was long ago turned into lumber, rotting stumps and thatch, cattle and horse poop, or even ashes. Yes, we have a few native sources of food (for years I have enjoyed the tasty Texas persimmons from our yard, even with the extra work of spitting out a lot of large seeds). But we seldom see them in our grocery stores except in the form of high-priced specialty jellies and jars of nopalitos (diced and cooked young prickly pear pads).
Of course, all of us Native Plant Society people advocate restoring much of our native flora for such vital purposes as stabilizing soil, saving water, and stemming the spread of invasive, and harmful, alien species. Oh, yes, and there’s the matter of beauty, often more subdued than in some showier nonnatives, but always appreciated by true connoisseurs.
For sure, we expect death in annuals, death of deciduous tree leaves, and death by freezeback in most of our perennial forbs and grasses. But all of us native plant growers hate to see a prized perennial, tree or otherwise, die early. (The spring of 2007 brought huge amounts of rain to central Texas, producing incredible amounts of pecans, which broke a lot of branches and actually killed two mature trees on our place. Oh, well, pecan wood is great for smoking meat, anyway.) We may not mourn a plant’s death, but in many cases we regret that a large tree can never be fully replaced in our lifetime. But, dear hearts, sorrow not for long.
Dead plants do more than feed humans and subtract beauty, though. Grazing buffalo used to leave large patches of bare earth after they moved on to greener pastures, and several ground-nesting species of birds prefer that kind of temporarily damaged habitat. Animals, like humans, also build homes out of available plant materials. Consider those ugly standing dead trees, called snags. The Texas Parks and Wildlife ranger who inspected our place for maintaining optimum habitat urged us not to cut down our snags, except near the house, so as to provide insect food for birds and to serve the nesting needs of some species, especially woodpeckers. He also recommended placement of several piles of cleared brush for small-animal shelters. Not only that, dead plant matter also gets recycled into rich soil amendment materials by microbes and larger animal life.
So, go ahead and hate death for snatching away loved ones or precious animal companions or even prized plants. But, thank God green is not forever. Death to flora? Bring it on! We need it, and our environment needs it.
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**ARCHIVED POST AUTHOR: chizum1
