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| Texas Madrone |
We arose easily the next morning due to the change to Mountain Time, and we soon headed for the upstairs dining room where continental breakfast was served. The most appealing offering was waffles hot off the griddle, but in order to get them you had to follow the 5-point instruction card explaining how to use the surprisingly complicated waffle machine. Learning new technology is difficult on any day before morning coffee, but I soon learned how to convert the unappealing watery batter from a Styrofoam cup into a delicious golden brown waffle. The coffee and waffles revived us from our sleepy state, and we began to make plans for an exciting day of discovery in the Guadalupe Mountains.
THE CAPITAN REEF
THE TEXAS MADRONE
Ever since I read about the region and its vegetation I had been looking forward to seeing the rare and distinctive Texas madrone tree. I had never seen one except in books, and I was hoping that it would not be too rare or difficult to recognize. To my surprise the very first thing we saw getting out of the car at the Guadalupe Park Visitor Center was a stately madrone growing right at the front step of the building. I recognized it immediately from the pictures I had seen. It was more beautiful than I had imagined—loaded with red-orange berries and oval green leaves that had no intention of turning any autumn color. The madrone’s autumn changes showed a different kind of beauty—most of the bark had characteristically peeled from the trunk and stems, revealing perfectly smooth flesh-toned “lady’s legs”. On some trees, the bare skin had a reddish hue, which I imagined to be a tribute to the Native Americans who had inhabited these mountains for over 10,000 years. We soon found out that madrones were abundant here, and we were about to see the tree in all shapes and sizes. Common names for the madrone include “lady’s legs” and “manzanita”, which is Spanish for “little apple” because of its little red berries, but the related manzanita trees in other parts of the country are distinct species.
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| Texas Madrone trees |
The Texas madrone (Arbutus texana or Arbutus xalapensis) is a relict of the last ice age which reached its peak about 20,000 years ago when enormous glacial ice sheets covered North America as far south as present-day New York and Chicago. By contrast, much of the southwestern United States was covered by temperate woodlands and grasslands supported by a climate that was cooler and wetter than the hot and arid conditions of today. Even the dry and forbidding salt basin at the western edge of the Guadalupe Mountains was once a 40 foot deep lake. The madrone grew freely on the mountainsides in this temperate environment alongside the Bigtooth maple (Acer grandidentatum) and other species that one would never expect on the edge of the present-day Chihuahuan Desert. Regions of higher elevation such as the Guadalupe Mountains received considerably more rainfall than the surrounding lowlands, allowing these trees to persist and adapt to the extensive changes in the climate that occurred over millennia of warming temperature and diminishing rainfall. Today the Texas madrone is found only in the higher elevations of far west Texas in places such as Big Bend and Guadalupe Mountains National Parks and the Lincoln National Forest in southeastern New Mexico. It also grows in parts of the Edwards Plateau in central Texas and in isolated parts of Mexico. Most attempts to grow the Texas madrone elsewhere have failed. The reasons why are not so obvious. The US Forest Service reported that after more than 10 years of experimentation, only 2 of 10,000 seeds planted in carefully controlled greenhouse conditions actually germinated and became established. But in the Guadalupe Mountains, many madrones are growing out of some of the worst-looking rocky soil that I have ever seen. I even discovered one madrone growing out of a crevice of a large boulder. Although it was small, it was no less beautiful than the larger specimens.
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