The mesquite is a pest — but it’s the only tree with a fan club

Press, 1 February 1986, Page 19

The mesquite is a pest — but it’s the only tree with a fan club

By

JOY ASCHENBACH,

National

Geographic News Service

For more than a century, mesquite, the wood that helped support the Alamo, ’ has been cursed, kicked, kerosened, chainsawed, and bulldozed as a pest in the American south west.

It is almost impossible to get rid of, experts say of the tough, gnarled tree with roots so deep and wide that it thrives -— even can produce bumper crops — during droughts. Varieties of the thorny menace have invaded 2 million hectares in Texas alone, growing so thick in places that they choke and rob once-prime range land. In New Mexico and Arizona, another 18 million hectares have been infested.

For nearly 40 years, the Texas Forest Service has tried to make something of the “good-for-nothing” tree. “It’s called turning a problem into a resource,” says Ken Rogers of the Service’s Forest Products Laboratory. Finally, mesquite has caught fire. Chunks of it, chips of it, logs of it, and charcoal briquets of it are burning in backyard barbecues and restaurant grills across the country. A new restaurant on. the Potomac River, near Washington, features mesquitefired steaks and seafood. There is even a “friends of mesquite” association, Los Amigos del Mesquite, whose 300 members are producers and consumers.

Although the wood can be used for everything, from parquet floors to gunstocks, 90 per cent of the nationwide mesquite business today goes up in smoke as cooking fuel, says Ken Rogers. Sales are expected to top $l2 million this year. Mesquite competes with another aromatic wood, hickory, for a distinctive smoke flavouring. “We used to chop our own mesquite from trees outside 'Dallas and take it on camping

trips for cookouts. We thought, if we like its mellow flavour so much, Others probably would too,” says Rozen Reed Williams of Dallas. “We pioneered the mesquite-chunks business."

She and her husband, Ray, operate one of the largest mesquite companies, producing three-pound bags of chunks in two seconds, and shipping them as far as Saudi Arabia. What is good for gourmets may be good for cattle ranchers, who welcome harvesters of their nuisance trees. The Williamses’ company leases more than 325,000 hectares of honey mesquite, one of the three major varieties among some 40 species. Ironically, the cattle drives of the Old West spread the mesquite menace. The cattle ate its nutritious pods and deposited them on to the soil in dung left along the trails. Mesquite was spreading like wildfire by the mid-1800s as overgrazing of ranch lands gobbled up any plant competitors. ' Mesquite was not always maligned, says a biogeographer, James Humphries of East Texas State University, who has studied the changing perceptions of the indigenous tree. Not only was. mesquite used for cross-timbers in the Almo and the first fenceposts on early ranches, but it provided “40 per cent of the diet of most native Americans in the South West,” he says. “It went from most-favoured food source to the status of pest” 4- The Indians used virtually the whole tree. They made a sweet drinrtsand breadlike ’ substance

from the pods, dried food from the seeds, (which were 40 per cent protein),’ antiseptics from the sap, needles and toothpicks from the thorns, and baby diapers from the bark, pounding it into a felt-like material. Like outdoor chefs today, they cooked with the wood.

“Mesquite was dependable. The people could always count on it regardless of climatic conditions, because drought has little effect on it,” Dr Humphries says.'; '

The tree’s remarkable roots can reach down 12 to 15 metres or more, all the way to the water table, arid can spread out at least 15 metres. A competitor for scarce water in the South West, a large, mature mesquite tree, usually only about 6 metres tall, can drink up enough to supply about a half-acre of grassland. In some places, it is said, dry creeks have started flowing again when mesquite was removed from the area. That may be a tall Texas tale but certainly it is true in theory, experts agree. Mesquite’s extensive root system makes it difficult to kill. “If you spray the trees with chemicals, they/ will, be just as bad again in five or six years,” Ken Rogers says. One effective method is pulling them up by the roots, or at least cutting them off about a foot below the surface.

There is no danger of burning up all the mesquite on barbecues, Rogers says. More than half of the Texas hectares — at least 13 million — have_ eight the wood per