By Bill Ward
Published in The Boerne Star on February 11, 2005
A good friend recently gave me a copy of Roy Bedichek’s “Adventures with a Texas Naturalist.” As a Texan who always has enjoyed Nature, I like Bedichek’s astute view of man’s relationship to Nature, at least as it existed in Texas of the recent past. As a very amateur native-plant enthusiast, I was especially happy to get some further education about Texas flora in his second chapter, entitled “Fences: Right of Ways.”
Fences and right of ways (or rights of way) get a lot of bad-mouthing from native-plant devotees. I’m certainly guilty of a few disparaging remarks about those subjects in past columns. Not that I’m taking back what I wrote before, but Bedichek’s insight into the relationship between these cultural features and native-plant populations has given me a happier perspective.
As Bedichek so eloquently complains in the first chapter of the book, “Fences: Fields and Pastures,” the fencing of Texas during the last 150 years has allowed profound changes and abuses to populations of native animals and plants. As an example directly affecting native plants, partitioning land with fences has undone the natural cycle of widespread prairie burns, thereby promoting unnatural spread of juniper and other unwanted plants.
Converting land to fenced fields and pastures reduces plant diversity and introduces exotic species. These changes are disastrous to the healthy ecological balance of a natural landscape. Unless pasture land is exceptionally well managed, fencing encourages overgrazing of the fenced parcels.
The Hill Country as we know it today is, in many ways, the outcome of mid-Twentieth Century overgrazing by sheep, goats, and cattle, all fenced in by barbed wire. Among other things, overgrazing promoted soil loss and had deleterious effects on infiltration of groundwater. This has led the Hill Country to suffer increases both in the frequency of flooding and the severity of droughts.
Roy Bedichek made many of these same complaints about fencing, but he also saw a virtue in fences along highways and railroads. It was Bedichek’s contention that cheap fencing (barbed wire) came early enough in the development of Texas that it saved a good deal of the native-plant species. First railroad right of ways were fenced off, and later most highway right of ways were fenced. Texas may be the most-fenced state. Free-ranging livestock did not roam the Texas landscape long enough to wipe out most native species, as probably has happened in longer-developed areas of the world.
Bedichek saw the fenced right of ways of Texas as elongate arboretums, where many species may have been saved from extinction. To know that Bedichek was right, one only has to look at the difference in the variety of wildflowers along almost any country road compared to the relatively few species inside the grazed pastures along that road. Those right-of-way wildflowers are not seeded by a highway department. They are vestiges of the native vegetation, preserved along the fenced-off roadways which are protected from cultivation and livestock grazing.
As Tim Kiphart said in a talk to the Native Plant Society of Texas, “Roadsides are a natural resource, an asset, and represent a sense of place.” He pointed out that roadways in some places have the last vestiges of the local native-plant communities. Kiphart advocates cooperation of government agencies, planning groups, and conservation organizations to preserve the unique ecology of the roadsides of Texas.
