On June 21, I mourned the mowing of a vacant lot where I’d found dewberries. The damage was catastrophic, but the tract is all green now. The first responder to the crisis was partridge pea, Chamaecrista fasciculata.
The vacant lot — scraped and bare 90 days ago — is now green with partridge peas, wondrously thick, about 8 inches tall.
It’s a low-rent example of what the biologists call succession. In Texas, the pine forests and prairies were always in flux. A lightning strike would ignite the pine straw on the forest floor, and the woods would burn for days. When the damage was done, the first species to come back were grasses. Before the Europeans came, the buffalo would sometimes follow the new grass. They’d trample any tree seedlings that came up, keeping the woods at bay for a while. Then, little by little, the woods would encroach, the pine straw would build up, lightning would strike.
If I were going to teach a child biology, that’s the way I would do it. When we found a disaster — a county mowing crew in a vacant lot — we’d try to guess what species would come in to repair the damage.
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