Generations and Other True Stories (11 page)

Unfortunately, whatever knowledge Californians and Arizonans have accumulated about plants that will thrive in their arid climates is of no use to North Central Texas. California's is a Mediterranean climate in which rain falls in the wintertime and not in the summer. Arizona is warmer than North Texas. Anything brought from there is likely to freeze in the winter.

Most plants from the northern and eastern parts of the United States don't do well in Dallas, either, because they come from acid soils. Many of them also can't take the hot summers.

“Where we need to look for plants for Dallas is in Iraq and Turkey and that Russian country next to Turkey and the pampas of Argentina and Paraguay, but we don't get along with any of those people,” Benny says. “Everybody wants to go to Mexico and look for plants, and that's all right for Houston and Brownsville, but not many of them are going to work here in Dallas.”

So for twenty years Benny has roamed his native Texas, searching out wild trees and shrubs that not only are beautiful but also might be able to grow in the waxy black soil of North Central Texas and survive the extremes of heat and cold that torture so many plants here.

Even that hunt hasn't been easy.

“I spend a little time in South Texas, just to keep from being ignorant of what's there,” Benny says. “But by the time I get to San Antone, I'm just kind of kidding myself about anything I bring back to Dallas, because winter's going to get it. I spend a little time in East Texas, but within thirty miles of Dallas I start hitting acid soil, and our soil here is highly calcareous. It has a high limestone content. Although I think the wax myrtles I brought back from East Texas are going to grow in this old black soil, most of the things that grow there just will not make it here.”

Of the five thousand plants that are native to Texas, he says, maybe twenty-five hundred are worth looking at as possible domestic landscape ornamentals.

“But the really good ones, I doubt if you're talking more than 250 to 300 species.”

And most of those will come from regions of the state where most residents of the Dallas area have never gone and have thought of as barren—the far reaches of the Panhandle plains and the deserts and mountains of the Trans-Pecos.

“Most of the stuff I bring back is from the Rolling Plains, the Caprock Escarpment, the Glass Mountains, the Apaches, the Del Nortes, and the Guadalupes,” he says, “because they grow in limestone.”

Benny finds the best specimens he can—often at the end of a lonely ten- or twelve-mile hike up some remote canyon—and brings cuttings or seeds from them back to Dallas. He plants them at the experiment station to see if they can take the Dallas weather and soils and water. If one flourishes and shows promise of looking pretty in somebody's yard, he'll try to propagate it. And if it propagates easily, he'll release it to the nursery trade and try to persuade nursery owners to propagate it themselves and offer it for sale to the public and to professional landscapes.

The grounds of the A&M Research and Extension Center are landscaped with his experiments, and a tour of them on his golf cart offers a botanical atlas of Central and West Texas:

“That dalea there is a ground cover from the Alpine area. This true sage—
Salvia gregii
—is in the trade now. Those madrone trees were grown from seed from the Hill Country near Medina. That Apache plume is from the Guadalupes. That lantana is from Langtry. Here are several species of the forty-seven oaks that are native to Texas. This big-toothed maple is from the Guadalupes. Have you ever been in McKittrick Canyon when the maples are in color? Awww, man, isn't that something? American smoke trees from Boerne. The pink, white, and purple cenizos. Shedscale. None of this stuff takes any water. Bitterweed from West Texas. Mexican hat. Black persimmon trees from the Hill Country. Animals just love them. Sabal—this is the closest thing we have to a native palm tree in Texas. Dogweed. Wax myrtles. Spice bush. Walnut. Indian cherry. The seven roses that are native to Texas. Doveweed from the Hill Country. Whitethorn. Four-nerve daisies. Arizona cockroach plant. Hawthorn…. ”

Benny estimates that he has collected and experimented with more than five hundred species of plants during the two decades he has been roaming Texas.

“I used to have a little old white Chevrolet pickup,” he says. “I put 347,000 miles on it, most of it going out to the Big Bend, the Davis Mountains, the Guadalupes. I'm the only one in the state doing this, growing this many plants, going this far to find them. This work isn't for people who want fast results. Garden clubs come out to the experiment station, and they want to see the greenhouse because they just know they're going to see pansies blooming and roses blooming. But all I've got is a bunch of little old seedlings that don't show anything yet. No flowers, no nothing. Some of them might not show anything for twenty years. Not many people want to wait.”

So far, Benny has released nine formerly wild species to the nursery trade of Texas and the Southwest as suitable for city landscaping. Five of them are cenizos, relatives of the beautiful gray-leafed shrub he has found on the La Linda road. The others are a mountain sage, a false indigo, and two desert willows.

Texas A&M has trademarked the cenizos as Green Cloud, White Cloud, Silver Cloud, Rain Cloud, and Thunder Cloud; the sage as Mount Emory; the willows as Dark Storm and White Storm; and the false indigo as Dark Lance. Framed pictures of them hang on Benny's office wall.

“I grew up out on the Rolling Plains right at the foot of the Caprock in Motley County,” he says. “A little place called Northfield. Our place was so small we didn't call it a ranch. Out there, anybody who didn't have a very big piece of ground, you didn't dare say you were a rancher. They'd laugh you out of the country. The old Matador sat on one side of us—800,000 acres—and on the other side of us was the Mill Iron, which was also several hundred thousand acres. So we just told everybody we were farmers.”

He was born sixty-four years ago. Not such a long lifetime ago, but long enough to have been a different world to grow up in.

“Some things stick in your mind,” he says. “I can remember when I was a little boy, one night a big wad of cowboys slept out on our front lawn, and the next morning before daylight they got up and ate breakfast. That was one of the last cattle drives to Estelline.”

Northfield, which never was much, almost has disappeared. He says, “We lost our school, and then my mother lost her church. She's Baptist, and they even came out and moved the church house away. My daddy was Campbellite—Church of Christ—and my granddad built the Campbellite church, and they held on a few years longer, and the building is still there, but nobody goes to it because there's no one there.”

He's leaning back in his office chair, drinking coffee, just talking. “And then we lost our post office. Our mail's put in a box on the road, you know. Boy, that hurts. It really does. My mother's eighty-five. She lives out there all by herself. She says she's happier there than she would be in town. Man, it's lonesome country. We're a long way from anybody. You can look off in the distance and see the Caprock Escarpment and the Quitaque Peaks. When you drive up to them, the Quitaques are just kind of pimples, is all they are. But from one hundred miles off they look like mountains. They're famous in that country. The only place we had a tree—unless you want to call a little old runty mesquite a tree—was down on the river. Our place is on the North Pease River. In the canyons we had a few little hackberry. But on the river, boy, you'd run into cottonwoods and maybe a maple and some shinnery oaks that would get pretty big. It was like going to another world when we would go down to the river.”

Many years later, in 1988, Benny published a book called
A Field Guide to Texas Trees
. It's a thick volume devoting a page to each of the trees native to Texas, with color photographs and maps of their habitats. It seems a strange work to have been written by one who spent so many years in a treeless country, but Benny says that may be the very reason he did it.

“I was so enthralled when we would go down to the river. Even though it was on our own ranch, we didn't see it often. It was sandy country, and we didn't know about Jeeps or four-wheel drive, so we couldn't get down to it in a vehicle. And in a wagon it took all day to go down there and back, so we didn't go often. What we went there for was the wild flowers, which always bloomed about the Fourth of July. And I'd get to see the trees and sit under the trees, and I never forgot that.”

After high school, he enrolled in Texas Tech, expecting to become a journalist. But World War II was still on, and he dropped out to join the Marines.

“I got in in time to get the Victory Medal, but not soon enough to be involved in the war,” he says. “I spent most of my hitch out in Los Angeles. When I saw how people lived in town, I decided not to become a journalist after all. I said, ‘Man, I don't want any of this damn stuff!' ”

After two years, he was discharged and went back to Texas Tech. He hadn't been there long before he discovered he had made a mistake. “When I was getting my discharge from the Marines and was about to go out the door,” he says, “there was a guy signing men up for the Reserves. And I was fool enough to do it.”

When the Korean War broke out, he was recalled into the service and assigned to the first Marine helicopter transport squadron ever formed. “But the reservists soon were let go,” he says. “A little over a year, and I was out again. I never got a chance to be a hero.”

He returned to Tech again, this time majoring in agronomy and farm machinery. His plan was to finish his degree and go back to the family farm in Motley County. “But I graduated right in the middle of the drought of the ‘50s,” he says, “and Daddy didn't even know whether he was going to be able to keep the farm or not. There just wasn't a place for me there. So I went to work for the Texas Research Foundation for $3,200 a year, and I've been here for thirty-eight long years.”

In 1973, not long after Texas A&M took over the research foundation, Benny got the idea that has consumed his life ever since.

“It's written down and approved by the hierarchy all the way to the Agriculture Department in Washington, D.C.,” he says. “It's called
New Landscape Plants for Texas and the Southwest
. That's my project. It's my job. And I'm the only one doing it.”

Like many pioneers, Benny found little understanding among his colleagues when he first began tramping about the wild places of the state in search of plants that might adjust to city life.

“Boy, it was rough the first few years,” he says. “I didn't seem to be getting anywhere, and people were shaking their heads at me like they didn't know whether I was wasting the state's money or not. People were saying to me, ‘Hell, we're just paying you to camp out.' For the first ten years, I tried to talk everybody in the A&M system into going out to the Trans-Pecos with me, but nobody would go. They didn't think anything was out there. Or maybe they just weren't interested. So I quit asking.”

Contrary to popular belief in the Trans-Pecos as a barren place, at least half of all the plants that are native to Texas are found there, and Benny estimates that about 50 percent of his work has been done in that supposedly empty region. “The Trans-Pecos is a meeting ground,” he says. “Plants come in from the Rockies, they come across the deserts from the West, they come up the Rio Grande.”

Experience has taught him that he's probably better off working alone, for searching for plants out in the vastness can be a lonely, tedious, exhausting business, not suitable for the fainthearted.

“First you have to do your homework,” he says. “You read the literature, and you find out where a certain oak tree, let's say, is supposed to be. If you can, you find somebody who has seen it up in that canyon where you think it might be. Sometimes the ranchers have seen the tree, but they don't know what you're talking about because they don't call it the same thing you do. Then the next thing is getting permission to get on the place. Sometimes getting permission is the hardest and longest part. When you get permission, then you've got to crawl up that ten-mile canyon to see if that oak's really there. Sometimes it's not. You can't find it. Then you go back a year later and you find it. You don't know why you missed it the first time. If it's not in fruit, you have to go back another time to get the acorns. You get somebody up a trail about fifteen miles in one hundred degrees, and you find out real quick how strongly he wants to do this.”

In his younger days it wasn't uncommon for Benny to get out of bed at four o'clock in the morning, make his trek up a canyon, and return at midnight with one plant, maybe, or a handful of acorns.

“On most of my trips I'm looking for a particular plant,” he says, “but then I'll take anything that occurs when I get out there. I always try to come back with something.”

He wraps his cuttings in plastic bags and puts them in an ice chest for the trip home, in hope that in twenty or twenty-five years their progeny may be growing in the back yards and office parks of North Dallas.

“A lot of the work is done on my own time,” he says, “and a lot of it is done on very short notice. If somebody calls and says, ‘Hey, the plants are in bloom,' I drop everything and go. I tell you, it sure does help to be a single man. I don't know that a married man, if he wants to
stay
married, could do this kind of work. You have to put first things first. I had a girlfriend once. I was getting pretty serious. And then she says, ‘You spend too much time out there in your damn flowerbeds.' I thought about that a
looooong
time, and then decided: ‘Well, if she's going to be that way, we may just as well put an end to it.' I was married once, years ago. Eight years. Too long. I figured: ‘If I do
that
again, it's my fault for sure.'”