Native Texan Horse Tale Reads

Acknowledgments HorseTale Reads


Tickanwa•tic (meaning "real people Tonkawa, Commanche

Acknowledgments

 

The native plants of Austin and the hill country of the Edwards Plateau, west to the deserts and mountains of Big Bend,  were all along a kind of experience of plants that a poet might translate to  human outpouring. When I landed there and took residence in a cement block house on a sheep ranch on the brow of Hungry Hill outside Austin, the edge of the Balcones Escarpment, I began to cultivate herbs. My first knowledge of Texas came from that.  Bull Creek Park remains just below the place were this occured. After finishing a PhD in English Renaissance poetry influenced by new world discoveries, instead of seeking a faculty position, I continued as a  horticulturist for the University's college of pharmacy's Experimental Drug and Herb Garden. Much of that poetry of the new world was plant based to which I was living so close on the Balcones Fault.  These activities brought me into friendship with many aficionados of herbs and native plants of that time. 

 

Walking along the Rio Grande with the Desert Tobacco hanging down from the rocky bluffs of the river, overhead in full bloom,  filling the air with the fragrance of its yellow tubules, blue leaves a kind of transfiguration, or searching for stands of Bois d’arc once planted as  fence lines in Elgin, then standing along rows of abandoned houses of the deserted farms and homes, going into the homes to read abandoned Bibles open on the floor, to the very verse, made the plants important in the human scale of history before those houses were developed into a new town from when the land had been only farms. These towns then gave way to the modern Elgin the way the modern Elgin will for its redo. I learned local history from acquaintance of my wife’s Texas family. Her grandmother arrived there in Elgin in 1920 to join her husband Ossian to farm. In 50 years the Elgin they knew was gone and  50 years after that  a new Elgin had arrived. The progressions of these developments on an upward sloping line reveal the herbal, historical and social use of the plants. I saw Spicewood Springs Rd. doing the same thing, going from ranches and ranchettes of the 50's to Savings and Loans Banks and Corporate HQs of the 80's. These natural and social changes are the message of the Bois d'arc from the good of the soil to the trees that marked the fence lines and functions as hedges and fences, which, added to the medicinal, stands together with the symbolism of plants named for myths and processes we do not know as the borders dissolve.

But we find them out.

The groves of Texas Buckeye on the Edwards Plateau, blooming in later March under leafless trees, at the instant of blooming  trumpet M 12 colored sun flames from their tips. Surrounded by black butterflies and moths that pollinate them or the humming birds that feet off the scarlet plumes of the salvia regla high up in the mountains of the Chisos, or in the field of English lavender planted in a hill country field to remind one of the profusion of lavender seen in North Wales, translate into poems. Every plant considered here has some kind of background in this aesthetic foundation, which will be seen as the telling progresses.  

  Dean Emeritus Henry M. Burlage was one of the founders of that Drug Garden in Austin. After conversations with him about his books on plants and herbs he recommendation that the college of pharmacy college undertook my employment there. Urging the "vast storehouse of medicinal compounds in these plants," Dr. Burlage had written multiple books on North Carolina and Texas herbs and native plants, which regard, even as the Dean of the College of Pharmacy, he maintained. But the Garden was lost to land developers when all four prime acres in central Austin were traded by the College of Pharmacy for a new Pharmacy building. This had obviously been in the works long before. After its finish the horticulturist took a one year appointment as instructor in the  UT English department before beginning as assistant professor at Bishop College in Dallas.

  Numerous relationships stimulated and informed this writing along the way including Carroll Abbott, the inventor of the native plant movement in Texas and Alta Niebuhr, whose own Herbs of Greece and many friendships helped circulate the three small printing Native Texans. She suggested that the title should be A Philosopher Looks at Plants. Her gift of a copy to botanist Brother Daniel Lynch of St Edwards University (Native and Naturalized Woody Plants of Austin and the Hill Country. 1981) resulted in an astonished response he sent to Alta in a lettter, "it humanizes botany in a way I never dreamed of."  Another reader, Dr. Mathis Blackstock of Austin believed "it reads like a novel." Most of all acknowledgment of this writing is due to the writer’s wife, Pat, herself a botanist, naturalist and physician who figures in every part and parcel as inspiration, support and companion in these endeavors.  

 

All this was in the background when the news of Carroll Abbott’s affliction of the return of cancer reached us in Dallas where Pat was in medical school. His Texas Wildflower News Letter gave the news. The first two articles were written after a dream about him to encourage him in the fight . These were sent to him and they appeared in the last two newsletters with a third left over, not issued when he passed. By that time however a whole manuscript had been written and was accepted serially by two small Texas presses, Eakin and Corona. Due however to a downturn in the oil market it did not appear and remained available only in the three small printings. There are some copies of these in the Briscoe Center for American history at UT. The original Native Texans is cited by Mark Warnock Turner in his Remarkable Plants of Texas: Uncommon Accounts of Our Common Natives and one or two Texas Naturalist newsletters like the Highland Lakes Master Naturalist Newsletter, September 2011, by Phil Wyde

The present ^new edition called Native Texan Horse Tale Reads is a complete rewriting with the addition of  new material amplifying the humor of the plants that was all along its chief attribute. The marketing distinction about whether these are plants, herbs, shrubs or trees is irrelevant here. While the first edition followed more historical premises, native to Anglo to modern populations, this is appears more along the lines of botanical taxonomy, simple to complex. The first articles that appeared were of the simple anyway, ”Horsetail Reeds,” now retitled is Horse Tale Reads, was the first in Texas Wildflower Newsletter (Kerrville: Green horizons, Winter, 1984) with “Medicinal Qualities of Native Croton, (Spring, 1984), next.  “Hedeoma” appeared in Texas Native plant Society News (San Antonio, March-April, 1985), “Pilgrim Mullein” in Newsletter of the Heard Natural Science Museum and Wildlife Sanctuary (McKinney, Texas), “Milkweed and the Wildflower Skeptic” in Friends of Greenills Newsletter (Dallas, June-July, 1984) and “The Longest Continuous Row of Horehound” in the Greenhills Newsletter (March-April, 1985). October, 1985,  The most notable offshoot appeared in the journal Conoscenza religiosa  in Rome (1983), translated into Italian in an edition dedicated to new American thought, Pianta Celeste o Stella Terrestre: il retroterra biblico nel rapporto fra piante e stele. Celestial Plant or Terrestrial Star.

 

Introduction

This 50 years' involvement with herbs, from c. 1970 to 2020 encompasses the perception that cycles of growth and decay attach to society also maybe in 50 year periods, a proposition inclined to attend if counting back from 2020 we could identify important moments of change which might likewise occur over the last 500 years in fifty years segments. Just for fun start from roughly 1520, or John Colet (d. 1519) and humanism and go on, off the top of the head in a kind of variant of the The Fourth Turning by Strauss–Howe as 2020 brings quantum supremacy, solar minimum, Covid-19, street riots and elections, the mask that covers human experience thus turned from metaphor to real.

 In 1970 my thinking was  that if I could get a cutting it would grow. Those years were filled with many greenhouses and plantings in all situations from herbs to trees. Fifty year intervals work anyway for the past and present, from 2020 back to 1970. This plane of observation shows monotypic habitats of every sort, botanical and social brought to an end. The oldest and most massive change for the plants is the live oak decline of trees, here before Columbus, who died in a pitifully short time when the decline ravaged the hill country and assassinated the live oak, while the cedar still creeps in its petty pace from day to day. Further, that monotypical country that was home to more deer than could be counted was overrun by packs of roving feral hogs, not to speak of all the exotic game ranches, and further not to speak of the King Ranch grass introduced c. 1920s, that invaded and covered the native blue stem over half of Texas. All these are in the mode of the diminutions of 2020  monotypic habitats which reducing the diversity of insects, birds and rodents; ethnics, communities, customs, and devastating natural social ecosystems with famine censorship and lockdowns. Though the fire ant invasion has abated some the Killer Bee is still strong, to be joined by the giant Asian Killer Hornet.

 King Ranch grass is not mentioned at all in the description of the Hill Country in the landmark Manual of the Vascular Plants of Texas of Correll and Johnston of 1970. If it seems entropy is at fault even that is not the whole story, but what is at fault, if we say we know we don’t. But our knowledge is illumined by an even longer view afforded by our fathers and mothers, themselves fallen to  the entropy. Their memories replay for us in the night, until that one day we wake and the constitution of the past is shredded. Anything that opposes entropy is conspiracy to both sides of the Hegelian dialectic. If we propound an ice age construct of the cycles of the sun, or the opposition to war, or the repression of governments for drafts, it is all subject tested against the background from which we were born. The founding of Elgin about 1870 offers itself as an example, along with the records of families that the Dalton Minimum can be measured, with every other like ill such as the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 by the memory and records of the ten generations of Philadelphia families from 1717 that are extant, where no account of hardship from  privation of cold or weather is found during those times, for they kept farming and living, and no ravage of disease but typhus took the artist Jesse Mack, and Elizabeth Bechtel after Childbirth in 1887. There are however injuries from war, of  suffering and death, of a brother taken in training in the air force at Lackland AFB in San Antonio in 1963, or a grandfather, born in Elgin in 1922,  member of a B-17 crew, part of the 8th Air Force 100^th bomb Group shot down on his 25^th mission over Rouen, France, June 24, 1944, evacuating by parachute and landing with a broken ankle to held until the end of the war, a prisoner of war at Stalag 4 and Stalag 1. He kept a journal on cigarette papers of the days in those camps, published thereafter (C. R. Carlson, Return Ticket), among all those who lived and died who left a record in the chests and linens, the old books with inscriptions, the letters, court cases that keep speaking. In World War I two uncles, one a commissioned second lieutenant who was too late to get to France, but his brother, an absolute pacifist, was an ambulance driver there like E. E. Cummings and who after stayed in France and worked as a carpenter for the Quakers in reconstruction. This Harvey Mack  had been a banker but remained a carpenter the rest of his life. From these we know too that one can recover from ills as did Grandpa Amasa Clark, returning from San Antonio after hauling a load of shingles there in 1856, sent upon by bandits that night who killed his two companions. (Reminiscences of a Centenarian, 31f, 46). He had served in the Mexican War against Santa Anna (1846-48) after the U.S. annexed Texas in 1845 and survived to 101 with his sons and daughters all over the west where we now ply upon the herbs and native plants their time honored songs.

That early resident of Bandera, Amasa Clark did more that cut and haul cedar shakes. He rustled camels in Camp Verde for a year or so for Colonel Robert E. Lee, then in the Union army, just over the Bandera pass. It was not called that then, so times change, but Bandera Pas as good a place as any to find these plants which are absolutely native among the arrowheads, spear points and flint middens, and you might also find slugs from the first colt revolvers fired in the battle of Bandera pass even if the romance of the Indian was not as great in that time as now since it recounts a dozen tales of depravation. Amasa Clark, named for a commander of King David, fought in the Mexican war for General Scott but  he was a peaceful man evidenced by his many wives, fruit orchards and long life of 101 years, but he did not participate in the Civil War having not recovered from the wounds from being attacked on the trail from San Antonio.

All fun aside, individuals come off well in these Horsetales.  But the species of expunged European Caucasoid language, food and beliefs pass like the names of every native tribe called the human being into fierce competition with every other tribe, whether Black Elk or Leslie Silko, Scott Momaday or Sherman Alexie, the same way Hispanic loyalty to family of Salvador Plascencia or Simon Ortiz reaches to the furthest reach of connection, cousins and mutual support. But all these subverted into gangs, drugs, accusations celebrated for import added to with every program of Bengali, Hindi, and colonies of Somalis and Ethiops brewing in the pot where none escape the ordo seclorum, only the individual bright spots occur among these groups in people who pick up the streets, look out for neighbors, offer prayer for the block, practice peace, who don’t have signs on their lawn advertising that hate doesn’t live there, or statutes of Bacchus and his organs next to their pomegranates. These last and best are the last individuals that cyber facial recognition makes extinct. Not that we should escape and rescue the perishing, care for the dying, but yes we will.

The plants cry out along with the rocks. Check on your blank screen or punch this book up here.  It sounds a little Shinto to say the ancestors are proof against the past when they are the proof of the present. Ancestors refute every legend of immortality you can name just as they refute every point of view but their own, which they live and affirm. Who are these people? They are the ones who put you here to pay attention to them, to prevent you dying in the Sedona sweat lodge of the Angel Valley Retreat because James Arthur Ray couldn’t get a cub scout uniform or a haircut, which is the logic of his defense after two years in the Arizona state prison after three deaths and many injured. Ancestors are proof against motivational speakers, and trans-everything, against space flight joining artificial intelligence to the human to increase sales, against Nazi bomber war scares that put plane spotters on the roof of the Philadelphia city hall Philadelphia city government in WWI, and all newspapers and civic organizations that printed millions of informational pamphlets of instructions for building shelters and periodic blackout drills for residents to turn off outdoor lighting, cover windows with dark curtains, dim automobile lights in order to disguise the city from potential attack craft, while along the region’s rivers and coastlines, residents volunteered to take shifts as submarine spotters.

We have to catch up to the past and its priors as it walks away from us or else we walk away from it, but who is moving? Isn’t it all simultaneous as So and So Plato said, that it is all remembered, already done, all here for our recall at the same time we are responsible by choice and with choice to affirm and prove we are real and not figments? How do we do prove ourselves? Giving up all helps, giving up drugs, excuses and standing naked in our thought where no eye sees nor ear has hears what God has prepared for those who love him, except it be revealed to them by His spirit.

 The creeks and rivulets of the past on Balcones Fault are gone. Filled in and redeveloped they cease to exist like the Indian mounds and flint chips exposed by the waters and excavations for new roads like behind Balcones Research Center (Pickle!). The mounds of romance and leavings of trade ventures for mescal bean around fires at trade junctions, held so precious, that once the tribes are removed, in a hundred years, are not remembered in the  aggression and terrors of conflict with the  present and future. The native is a terror to the present, but the present becomes its threat to the future, endangering the existence on the land, fracking and drilling, mining and plowing, as if the land itself opposed the new but was conquered, the same land that was accursed for the sins that all things will end, yet the world remain. 

 It depends on whose point of view we hear, but the tickenwantic do not speak, except in the first missionaries to them, the way Voth speaks for the Hopi or Las Casas for the Aztec. We take all that as a given and invest our present with truth in the conflict, but extend the reach and let Amasa be a native, or the bomber Group, or old Elgin buried, shoveled under, having to be relived in pictures and histories written by the same present as Las Casas represented for 1520, fully invested with itself. But take another step as the digital and quantum do what they have done, without remorse, conscience or regret to sweep away, bury, undercut, objectify into extinction and replace with veritable the brave, new world.  The ordo seculorum holds out by Palantirs of it to the wretched man. Who shall deliver thee from the body of sin and death, so that with the twinkling of an eye we are stand by the river Chabar with Daniel, and weep by the rivers of Babylon too for our deliverer. So with this past in mind one who looks after the previous 50 year cycle sees it in 2020, the time of the greatest control and propaganda ever known where things like polar bear pigs and thousand pound super mutant pigs, three times life size, bred to restore China’s strategic pork supply go along with the cows that can’t ride in Mack trucks boyo.  

 

 These do not contribute to the drug use of hallucinogens under the sun of  exhaust, marijuana and peyote, not social but of personal expanse, as if any attempt to disorder the mind to loose creativity, after Rimbaud, would give insight and freedom from the norms which bind. There is hardly a poet to name who has not done a stint on the weejee pot. We met in our youth and beyond, for they die young mostly with no help from prohibition against exces, younger than the guru Chuang Tzu, who had all insight but no record of drugs.The shamanic oracle and inebrebiate Dionysian poets ape the Sumer prophets and and carry all the down to the oleander used in Greece to inebriate the Delphic oracle. Oleander is planted down the mediums of Texas interstates now, so we here must partly refute the body of tradition that grows up around the plants. This must be done with fresh insight to make the plants live to us beyond the descriptions in herbals and plant manuals.

To see the thing itself apart from all the ideas from which it is formed, the Tagetes lucida, licorice marigold among the Aztecs, used to anesthetize victims who had their hearts torn out in sacrifice, or the DMT that showed McKenna how to predict the end of the world with the IChing, took a next step in the  insectoid visions that made Tao Lin  (facetiously) eat the hamsters of his previous life and work. It is not far from there to seeing apparitions of Charles Olson after his parting, as Albert Glover tells in his pursuit of the amanita muscaria if not Olson’s peyote laced with strychnine,” to say nothing of the Jimson flower whose scopolamine is the chief CIA drug at Guantanamo, or to recognize how, as the octotillo roots network into vast  communities underneath the soil, or the red, ivory, cinnamon, orange-skinned limbs of Texas madrone resemble a human torso, of muscle, bone and sinew in the high definition of the arms of athletes. When the bark peels and the madrone matures, or the mescal bean (Texas Mountain Laurel) seeds and its natively scarlet colors turn orange after passing through the digestion of a goat, these are among celebrated new psychotropic age. Mescal Beans are planted all over the University of Texas campus with the even more famous Mexican Buckeye equally traded and found in rock shelters from the 12^th century.

Alta Niebuhr. Herbs of Greece. The New England Unit of the Herb Society of America: J. Makris, Athens, 1970.

--Herbs of Texas, 1977

--Interview with Alta Niebuhr, 1980

Transcript here

 Henry M. Burlage

Kim Keubel (1940—2010) was a semi-recluse who worked for a while at the Garden. He brought his pet banisteroposis to live in the greenhouse. That work suited him although we argued about methods. I didn’t want him to put his lunch in the refrigerator for concern that it was contaminated like the radioactive refrigerator at the Clayton Foundation where I  worked those years. Kim knew a lot about cactus especially, but we disagreed about semantics. He argued that the commandment about taking the Lord’s name in vain only applied to the Hebrew word!

To explain the why and how of this writing, after finishing a doctorate in literature at the U of Texas, but uninterested in entering the formal application process for new PhDs of the profession, my next (professional) activity was in botany. Having never been to a Modern Language Association Convention where those hirings are done, tales of the real business conducted would abound, drunken carousals in private rooms to the hoped for advances of tillitated professors on hand. Having experienced these professors spent one summer reading years before in their element at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where  the attitude of pride was displayed, even if the literature of the renaissance was filled with courtiers, lobbyists, estate secretaries and paramours, that being the stock in trade of a poets in those times and now, neither was I inclined to  frequent bars and saloons in the company of artists, even if the artistic gene was prominent. So with no Franz Kline assaulting DeKooning in New York, what did that leave? Right you are, herbs. My first profession after finishing that degree was to become a horticulturist at the University of Texas Experimental Drug and Herb Garden of the College of Pharmacy, where this book came to be written.

Always acknowledging the friendship of serendipity, later known as the blessing of generations of Mennonites in my background, that these are people of relentless pacifism, farming and public welfare who hold to such promises good that the blessing of God falls upon those who serve Him to a thousand generations. Unbeknownst at that time, of a family of such and the tenth generation of that genome in the new world, meaning Philadelphia, all which since traced, delineated and examined from a scholarly reference, which training was of value, withal I even written some literary criticism as far as it goes. Before all of this, as a student at an institute of technology, but to further became a poet as well as explore the the English renaissance I began at the University of Iowa graduate progream immediately after interning with a publishing house of the Latin America Mission in San Jose Costa Rica, which deeply formed a resolve to be a poet.  After two years at Iowa and an M.A., another Mennonite prerequisite took me in the form of application through a clearing house recruiting faculty for the 50 or so predominately black colleges. This resulted in joining the faculty of Fayetteville State University in Fayetteville North Carolina before taking the road to Texas. Mennonites are prone to service of this kind, as well as the cultivation of herbs, so it is no surprise that after the demise of the Drug Garden, I served at another such institution, Bishop college, in Dallas, which did result in promotion and tenure, at least until that college expired, but let us not get ahead.