Essays

Moseying: Exploring the Natural World

Creosote bush along the Midkiff road
April 20, 2005

“Is there a twelve-step program for wildflower fanatics?” Deborah, my wife, shook her head as we headed home down the highway at 11 p.m on an early April Sunday night. We had just driven 550 miles and identified 110 species of wildflowers. “We are crazy! We are going to be so tired at work tomorrow – but I don’t regret it! Not one bit! And just like last year, the best early spring wildflowers were right here in west Texas… square miles of flowers stretching as far as we could see – in the Hill Country the flowers were just along the roads. In Central Texas there is too much grass growing, giving the flowers too much competition, and the higher livestock numbers there keep the flowers from being so prolific, too.”

I rubbed my eyes and yawned. “We found more species in Midland County than we saw throughout the hill country. One of the most incredible sights was when we drove towards Iraan, and the bladderpod covered every inch of ground between the creosote bushes. Our fields of bladderpod and honey daisy smelled sweeter than the flowers in the hill country, too. The agarita and mountain laurel in the hill country smelled wonderful, but I love the smell of the creosote bushes the most, especially right after a rain. It is the smell of rain! It is not a floral smell, and some people don’t like it, but it is the most refreshing scent I know.”

For years I have cut sprigs of creosote bush for an air freshener in my truck. I have even used it as a deodorant or cologne, by rubbing it on my skin. Deborah has made creosote bush soap especially for me, first processing its essential oils out of the leaves, and then adding the oil to the mix as she “cooked” the old-fashioned lye soap. She collected the leaves from plants near the dinosaur tracks on the highway between Fort Stockton and McCamey. Every time we have used the soap, we savor the memory of the day we collected it, and the memory of the place. It is special – and how often can you say that about soap that you buy?

Creosote bush grows near Midland, too. After a daytripper crosses Johnson Draw 10-15 miles south of town, the plant becomes dominant. For botanists it is an “indicator” plant of the Chihuahuan Desert, and is found from Johnson Draw and on to the south for hundreds of miles. There is a small population off of 1788 on the way to Seminole in Andrews County, and it grows along the Pecos River Valley as far north as Carlsbad and along the Rio Grande as far north as Bosque del Apache near Socorro.

We grow creosote bush in our home landscape. It should be used more – if sheared back, it can make very formal hedges like those of English Boxwood. The boxwood needs 45 inches of irrigation and acidic soil – but creosote bush can be happy with less than 5 inches and not much more than gravel for soil. That makes a big difference in the water bill! It has pretty yellow flowers, and cute little white seeds, and the scent – oh, the scent! I love it! It is fresh and bracing – it clears the mind! (I am a desert rat, I admit, a lover of the arid country, so my sensory aesthetics are shaped by where I live!)

Deborah went out of town on business Sunday and feeling a little lonely and blue, I took a drive past Johnson Draw on the road to Midkiff. As I drove up the slopes of the wide valley and climbed past the Day-Glo patches of hot-pink Indian Paintbrush, I smelled the creosote bush. The scattered clouds must have gotten together for a moment sometime earlier and dribbled just long enough to cause the leaves of the creosote bush to release their resins. I stopped, but no raindrops had pockmarked the sand of the barditch.

I inhaled deeply, and the memory of collecting the soap producing leaves flooded my mind. Closing my eyes, I started grinning goofily, thinking of Deborah. So what if we are plant fanatics – we have so much fun! So what if we will spend 12 hours straight hunched over books, researching our plant books to create a database of west Texas plants with folk uses? So what if we drive up to 700 miles in one day to fill our souls with one of the most glorious blessings given to all humans by Power far greater. Oh, Deborah! I am so lucky to be married to you!

And speaking of Power far greater… creosote bush gives us an example of that. It is such an unique plant! Given close study, it reveals amazing information that boggles the mind. The oldest plant in the United States is a creosote bush. In the Mojave Desert there is a ring of creosote bushes with identical genetic structure, and when its dead wood was dated by carbon dating, “King Clone” was calculated to be 11,000 years old.

To make it even more mysterious, palynologists have not found creosote bush pollen in fossilized packrat middens beyond 15000 years ago. This has led scientists to believe that creosote bush emigrated here from South America as the last Ice Age began to end, the seeds attached to migrating birds. Geneticists are amazed at the fact that there are three different distinct populations of creosote bush. The ones in Texas have one set of chromosomes. The creosote bushes in the Mohave and Sonoran deserts demonstrate polyploidy – they have more than one set of chromosomes! Polyploidy enhances drought resistance in many species of plants.

Entomologists studying the insects in creosote bush have realized that at least a score of insect species specialize on the plant – and, in fact, can not live on other plants. Despite the complex chemical structure that deters most insects, some need the plant. Two species of grasshopper and one katydid species are found only in creosote bush habitat. One species of walking stick is a perfect mimic of a dead twig of the plant. Three moths, a weevil, and a gallfly, a scale insect and a mealy bug have to have the species.

A number of years ago I gave a program on west Texas plants in Fort Stockton, and after telling the audience some of the above information, a lady stood up and told me that she had cured herself of cancer by drinking a tea made of the plant. Chemists have identified some antibiotic properties within its chemical structure, and American Indians believed that using a poultice of crushed leaves added to grease and put on a wound caused it to heal more quickly. Michael Moore, the leading medical herbalist of the American southwest, reports that a tea made of creosote bush is good for intestinal problems, and that soaking in bathwater with a gallon of the tea added is great for arthritis. But curing cancer? She believed so, but I can not find any scientific studies that validate her belief.

I walked to the fence line and snapped off a branch. I stripped the leaves from it, and rubbed my handful of leaves back and forth in my hands. I inhaled its smell again, and the bracing odor cleared a clogged nostril. I removed one hand, looked at it, saw the glistening sticky resin and then rubbed that along a mesquite thorn scratch on my arm. An attractive black and white moth fluttered from the plant from which I had snapped the branch, and landed where I had just rubbed the resin. How incredibly wonderful!