It doesn’t take too much to get me excited and I think finding Wright’s mock buckthorn was pretty cool, not to mention just what the doctor ordered; “Get out into the wild to cure the blues Mister Mesquitey!”
I had the hardest time figuring out how to pronounce Sageretia. It’s one of those words you may read over the years, but never say out loud. Finally, I took my own advice: say it loud with authority and let folks think, “So that’s the way you say that.”
I love that the only claim to fame I found for the French botanist Augustin Sageret, whose name is honored, was that he hybridized a musk melon with a cantaloupe in 1826. I wondered if he was invited to soirees because of that. “Let’s invite Augie and ask him to bring the melons.”
No plant photos of mine, just me wandering among some plants at home last summer. However, below is a link to a good description of Sageretia wrightii with some good photos as well.
https://swbiodiversity.org/seinet/taxa/index.php?taxon=3558&clid=3121
This is a rambling episode about beer cans in the wild, plant gestalt, and instincts about places. Oh, and an interesting plant called Sideroxylon...
One of my favorite forests of chain-fruit cholla, also called jumping cholla, was in the desert on the north end of the Tortolita Mountains....
Phemeranthus aurantiacus, the former Talinum aurantiacum, is now in Talinaceae, the flameflower family, “a family of two genera and 28 species.” There’s more; the...