Petey Mesquitey is KXCI’s resident storyteller. Every week since the spring of 1992 Petey has delighted KXCI listeners with slide shows and poems, stories and songs about flora, fauna, and family and the glory of living in southern Arizona.
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I’m pretty sure I first encountered the plant called mala mujer in the Santa Rita Mountains south of Tucson over 30 years ago. And I’m also pretty sure that I turned that encounter into an episode of Growing Native and I mispronounced the genus Cnidoscolus. “The C is silent,” my botanist/horticulturist friend Gene Joeseph gently told me. Where would I be without friends like that, right? Well…
In 1881 botanists John and Sara Lemmon were collecting and botanizing in an area called Rucker Valley in the Chiricahua Mountains. And, they were staying at a military camp called Camp Rucker. I mention this because the old Camp Rucker site is very close to where Ms. Mesquitey and I were hanging out. I was so excited …well, I still am… to identify the same buttercup that John and Sara collected…
The first time I saw and identified crimson sage (Salvia henryi) was years ago just outside Paradise in the Chiricahua Mountains. ..”just outside Paradise” is a wonderful line… anyway, Marian and I were checking out a native mulberry when we saw the bright red flowers of crimson sage on the same hillside. Later I learned later that John and Sara Lemmon collected it in the Chiricahua Mountains in…
It’s a little bit of a leap from talking about a plant in the aster family to talking about Senna in the pea family. It’s the way my mind was working at the time I guess. Senna species are found around the world. If you were to purchase the herb senna in a store or online it would probably be derived from Senna acutifolia, native to Sudan, Egypt and cultivated in parts of India. Our native sennas…
An episode written and recorded amidst the cluttered space that I call “books and bones.” Asclepias involucrata has a wide range in the southwestern US and into Mexico. I’m thinking It would be a fun addition to a wildflower pollinator garden, so ask about it at your favorite native plant nursery. Queen butterflies and their caterpillars certainly thought it was a nice addition to my hoop house.…
Arizona white oak is Quercus arizonica. I’ve come across some magnificent ones over the last 30 years of living near them. We planted a few in our yard as well, grown from collected acorns. Those oaks have stories too. The photos are mine of some of my clutter and that’s Ms. Mesquitey’s hand on the trunk of the huge white oak talked about in this episode.
The photo is mine and taken from our place looking west toward the Dragoons. I call the photo, “Come to Poppa.”
I first learned this snake as the western hog-nosed snake (Heterodon nasicus). It’s now called the Mexican hog-nosed snake (H. kennerlyi). And this is neat, well at least for me; a snake of my Kentucky youth was the eastern hog-nosed snake (Heterodon platirhinos). It has all the same crazy wonderful behavior as our borderlands species. Back in those olden days I remember folks called it puff adder…
Spotting Wyoming paintbrush (Castilleja linariifolia) with those bright red inflorescences out on that gravelly plain in a thicket of Apache plume was so cool. Our “what’s going on quest” was a success. Paintbrush is what’s going on! The photos are mine. Do you see the beaks? Pretty cool.
The distinctive odor of canyon ragweed (Ambrosia ambrosioides) is so Sonoran Desert. Hey, burs in your flip flops is a very Sonoran Desert thing too and some of those burs could be from kissing cousin Ambrosia deltoidea. Oh, I forgot to mention that canyon ragweed has medicinal uses, so you may want to look up its uses. So Sonoran Desert! And the plant list that I was perusing and enjoying was for…
