By Bill Ward
Published in The Boerne Star on July 11, 2003
Now that I know a little bit about Hill Country vegetation, I find myself comparing our native plants with those in other places I visit. During the last part of May and first part of June, I was with friends from the Autonomous University of Barcelona looking at Cretaceous limestones in the foothills of the Pyrenees. It was a perfect time of year to be in northeastern Spain, because the wildflowers and native bushes were in full bloom. There are some surprising similarities in plants of that part of Spain and some of our Hill Country natives.
One of the common small understory trees that was blooming over there looks to my nonprofessional eye exactly like our rough-leaf dogwood (Cornus drummondii). It is possible that, indeed, I was seeing some species of Cornus, because that genus occurs in northern latitudes around the world. I didn’t have my Catalan-English dictionary; so the common name meant nothing to me.
Another noticeable bloomer was a honeysuckle with the same shrubby growth habit as our Texas honeysuckle or white honeysuckle (Lonicera albiflora). The difference is that the honeysuckle of northeastern Spain has profuse flowers that are gold and white streaked with red-purple.
If you stop to think about it, the common name “honeysuckle” is a peculiar word. How do you try to translate that? It turns out that the name for this plant in Catalan is “xuclamel”, strictly translated as “sucks honey” or “is sucking honey” (xucla = sucks or is sucking, and mel = honey).
There is even a terrestrial огchid in northeastern Spain that reminds me of a larger version of ladies’ tresses (Spiranthes cernua), the little orchid that grows on certain wet slopes in Boerne. Whether the Spanish one is actually a Spiranthes species I don’t really know, but it is a similar white-flowered orchid.
The bushes and small trees of evergreen pistachio (Pistacia sp.) in northeastern Spain remind me a great deal of our evergreen sumacs (Rhus sempervirens) in leaf size and growth habit. In the western Mediterranean area, they seem to occupy the same ecological niche which evergreen sumacs occupy in the Hill Country. Probably if I lived farther southwest in this state, the Mediterranean pistachio would remind me of the Texas pistache (Pistacia texana).
Of course, there probably are many more differences than similarities in Hill Country and northeastern Spain vegetation. For one thing, where we have extensive fields of solid blue when the bluebonnets are in bloom, they have large areas of solid red when the poppies are in bloom. It is a spectacular sight.
Some people might ask, “Well, what about our Texas red poppies?” It is a myth that there are native Texas red poppies. As a joke, Jan Neiman of Native American Seed in Junction once sent me a postcard from a book of 21 postcards entitled Texas Wildflowers (published in California). The card pictured a colorful close up of red poppies. You won’t find that in Enquist nor in the Native American Seed catalog, even though you may see it cultivated in fields east of Fredericksburg. Where they grow wild in Texas, red poppies are invasive exotics.
There is another big difference in Texas and northeastern Spain. The brush in the uncultivated and unirrigated terrain of that part of Spain is mostly thornless and smells good to trample through. It is rosemary, thyme, and lavender. The only thorns are on wild roses and one kind of asparagus. There are no cactuses. They are plants of the Americas.
After seeing where rosemary and lavender thrive in the wild, I know why they do so well as drought-tolerant plants in our Texas gardens. Rosemary and lavender seem not to be invasive in Texas, need little care, and have an odor that deer hate. Those facts put them among my favorite Texas-native-compatible exotic plants. Tex-Med landscaping does well in our yard.
