Mesquite: Belonging

LifeScapes 8: May, 2024

“One learns a landscape finally not by knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by perceiving the relationships in it—like that between the sparrow and the twig.”—Barry Lopez

It’s nearly the end of May, we’ve already had our first 100-degree day here in the Texas Hill Country, and the honey mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa) trees are heavy with yellow-gold catkins—sausage-shaped clusters of fragrant, five-petaled, bi-sexual flowers. (How marvelously efficient!) Their nectar is powerfully attractive, and the native bees can’t resist it. Stand with me for a moment under the 30-foot-tall tree outside my kitchen door. You’ll hear it buzzing with excitement, delighted (I’m sure) to be hosting such a crowd of devoted, out-for-all-they-can-get friends, who carry the nectar off to their hives and turn it into honey.

Not everybody shares the bees’ enthusiasm for these scrawny, misshapen mesquites, studded with dangerous thorns. Landscapers don’t find them attractive, so you won’t see many in suburban yards. Ranchers call them pests—“the devil with roots”—claiming that they suck up too much water, an unforgivable sin in an arid environment. They’re stubborn: just try to get rid of one. You’ll see. Worse yet, they’re prolific. When a mesquite finds a place to call home, it puts down roots (deep roots) and begins making baby mesquites.

But humans are responsible for much of the spread of mesquite by suppressing prairie fires and overgrazing the prairies. And while any animal that eats a mesquite bean can spread the seed, it was the massive 1880s cattle drives that carried mesquites north.

“In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.” — Alice Walker

The standard complaints overlook important tradeoffs. Mesquites are legumes, like the beans and peas in your garden. Hardy in zones 6-9, they’ve struck a deal with bacteria that live on their roots (Rhizobia) and convert atmospheric nitrogen to a form that the tree and its immediate neighbors can use. That’s why the grass is greener and more lush under mesquites than under other trees. (I’ve been rereading Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree, so this makes perfect sense to me.)

And it’s true that mesquites are deep-rooted, as much as 200 feet below the surface and 50 feet beyond the perimeters of their canopies. But that makes them particularly skilled at carbon sequestration, transferring atmospheric carbon dioxide deep underground—a handy trick, these days, considering the carbons we humans are pumping into the planet’s air.

Anyway, there’s not a lot of traditional cattle ranching in Burnet County now, and it’s harder than it used to be to object to mesquite. The deer, raccoons, and coyotes love the ripe beans, and a mesquite thicket makes fine wildlife cover. The wood is great for barbecuing and coveted for furniture-making. Mesquite honey is the best you’ll ever spread on your cornbread. The beans make a delicious jelly. Dried and ground, they produce a nutritious flour that can be baked, like this mesquite tortilla. Or mixed with venison and dried as a jerky—the native version of fast-food convenience. Or stirred into a smoothie-like atole.

We’ve eaten from our garden here at MeadowKnoll, from the chicken coop and the barnyard, and from Bill’s hybrid pecan trees. But the mesquites, like the prickly pear growing nearby, have a different mode of being. They’re radically undomesticated, wild, and willful. They have a deep-rooted, hold-fast, reciprocal relationship to this place. They take from it and give to it. They belong, in ways I want to belong.

Making mesquite flour in my metate gives me time to think. It’s a traditional food and this traditional means of preparing it makes me feel deeply connected—not just to the place where I live but to the long-ago nomadic women for whom this scrawny little tree meant survival.

Not long ago, I turned some of the flour into muffins. I took one outdoors and ate it under the tree that gave it to me, in a landscape I’m just learning how to learn.

I thought about nitrogen and carbon. And belonging. And was grateful.

Recipe for these mesquite-cornmeal muffins