I’m lucky to live beside the Ol’ Guajolote. It’s not on the land where we live, but runs through other neighbors’ properties next to us. That said, at the end of July and into August of 2017 we experienced several days of immense flooding. During that event we did have the creek running through our land at a couple places. It was pretty exciting, but we couldn’t cross the creek and that got old after about five days…well, I ran out of beer.
Anyway, it’s a good place to amble with our dogs and there is always something to be seen, from owls flapping out of the thick canopy of oaks, to long stretched out gopher snakes, or in the case of this story, little thickets of seedlings where seed was deposited or covered by mud along the banks. The canyon hackberry seedlings were not under a hackberry trees, but the seed had floated to spots where detritus was deposited and they germinated there. It one area I found over 25 hackberry seedlings in a square foot of moist bank.
The Emory oak seedlings I speak about were under a favorite oak. The acorns had floated into little piles, and had “germed’ in the moist soil. By the way, it is no coincidence that emory oak acorns fall at the beginning of summer monsoon.
Wonderful little thickets of seedlings growing along the banks of the creek may well be part of that riparian corridor many, many years from now. On our walk that day I saw the future and it looked good. The dogs, however, live in the present and we moved on.
The photos are mine. Above are a bunch of small canyon hackberry seedlings and below some small Emory oaks with Chuchu’s feet in the background.
