Essays

Moseying: Locations of Interest

Odessa museums and summer wildflowers
July 9, 2003

It is only 20 miles to Odessa, but coming back it is 60 miles! During the last full week of June I had to run over to Odessa to give a program. Afterwards, I toured the Ellen Nöel Art Museum and the Presidential Museum, before heading back to Midland. Then, I came home the long way, by the way of Pegasus.

It took me two hours to go the 60 miles. I could not have done it quicker – I had to pay my respects to the glories of the rains of June. Great pools of wildflowers graced the barditches of the highways. Native grasses danced in the breezes – the first flowering panicles of wild grasses I have seen in quantity for six years – since August of 1997.

The new Presidential Museum building is, well, presidential, because of its architecture. The first room entered is a big circular room with a very high ceiling. What fun – can it be called a rotunda? I teased Director Carey Behrends by accusing him of digging up the ornamental grass in front of the Petroleum Museum in Midland and planting it at the new museum. He had been the assistant director at the Petroleum Museum when the Guadalupe Mountains muhly grass had been planted there in the late 1980’s. (The grass at the Presidential Museum is not muhly grass.)

Mr. Behrends and I chatted about the gradual development of a Llanero horticulture that we have both witnessed. Nowadays several dozen species of plants adapted to heat and drought are commonly used in local landscapes. Twenty years ago Texas Sage was the only such plant used, but now residents of the southern Llano Estacado have an exponentially increased knowledge and pride of the plants that signify the southwestern United States.

At the Ellen Nöel Art Museum I toured the Rhodus Sculpture and Sensory Garden, as I always do when I go there. Maintained by the Permian Basin Master Gardeners, it has been instrumental in the development of an endemic Llanero horticulture in Odessa. Every spring the Museum has a plant sale featuring appropriate ornamental plants for our climate and soils.

The Art Museum’s show “Metal Arts 2003” is what had drawn me to the museum. One of the displays, entitled “Earth, Wind, Air, and Fire” which incorporated milagros hung from human shapes caught my eye as representational of the increasing awareness of the major cultural influences of the southwestern United States. The show goes beyond the silhouette metal art cutouts that I believe originated here on the Llano Estacado.

The Art Museum also has a collection of photographs from the Arctic Wildlife Refuge on the North Shore of Alaska. Put together and sponsored by environmental groups, its interpretation was heavily slanted toward preservation. My response to the display was typically chauvinistic – we could have as spectacular photographs done right here on the Llano Estacado – why don’t we celebrate our home bioregion in the same fashion?

With that thought in mind, I had to take the time to wander around southern Midland County looking at wildflowers and scenery. I had been seeing the barditches full of wildflowers as I drove to work, but I had not taken the time to go for a drive and enjoy the results of the June rains. In my mind, that was a sin!

The rain had stimulated riotous, delirious bloom – the intensity of the colors was hallucinogenic, brightened in contrast by the green of the grasses. In mid-morning a small thunderstorm had developed from the collapsed formations of the previous night’s super thunderstorm further west. The moisture washed everything clean, and the clouds overhead prevented the normally over-bright sunlight from washing out the colors of the vegetation.
As I drove, I wrote down the names of each species that formed big colorful patches. I saw sky-blue pools of nightshade, white drifts of sleepy daisy, orange splashes of copper mallow, and miles of yellow spiny aster, yellow wild zinnia, and one hot pink cascade of sand penstemon.

Sometimes a pool of color would turn out to be a species rarely found in numbers dense enough to dominate. One small playa just southeast of the new Family Dollar facility was painted with a lovely shade of burnished brass. I stopped to walk to the fence line, the first of two dozen brief stops on the way home. It turned out to be hog potato (Hoffmanseggia.) Old timers of the Rolling Plains and the Llano Estacado know the plant well, for about three feet down in the soil are little hard swellings on the roots that taste delightfully nutty. About five times a year a visitor to the Sibley Nature Center will bring in a small specimen asking if it is a baby mesquite tree – it never is more than 6 inches tall and is thornless, but it does have similar leaves.

I have been using the FM 1788, FM1787, and FM1492 cut-off to Crane and McCamey all of my life. I have driven past the old Pegasus oil camp a zillion times, but I had never gone to the end of the pavement of FM 1788. So this time I did -- I parked at the end of the road, where the Cross L Pens sign made me remember a kid back in my high school days that claimed there was a draw down by the pens. He claimed the draw was rock-bottomed and had a tinaja that held water most of the year, with an old cottonwood or two providing shade for the water. I have never learned if he was lying, or not. Terra Incognita always creates stories.

The countryside on the south side of Johnson Draw was beginning to “gant up” (show signs of being stressed for the need of water.) The patches of grass were still green, but the only wildflower still blooming at the end of the road were perfect mounds of blackfoot daisy. I had just seen it used in the Rhodus Garden at the Ellen Noel Museum. When used in the cultivated landscape, the blackfoot daisy trails and cascades, but in the wild it is always a 4-6 inch round-topped mound. It fills my heart to overflowing that fellow Llaneros find our native wildflowers worthy of the ornamental garden. That is the way it should be – we should sing hosannas when our flowers bloom!