Note: This story is intended to be listened to. Text associated below is simply a transcript of the audio.
This is our kid, around her first birthday. It was a long time ago.
If she finds out I’m sharing the sounds of her whining and crying, she’ll tell me I’m embarrassing her. But I love listening to this because it reminds me of a time when she was absolutely dependent on us – when she needed to be soothed and fed and changed; when she’d wake up in the middle of the night crying and hungry, and I rushed over to her to nurse, sacrificing my own sleep to soothe her.
A few years ago, during a hike in the Sonoran Desert where we live, I saw something that made me realize that the kind of mothering I miss, that kind of caring and nurturing for another being, shows up in the vegetal world as well.
I saw an old mesquite tree, its branches dry and twisted, hugging a couple of saguaros that didn’t quite reach up to my waist. I say “hugging,” because, literally, the mesquite’s branches extended out and not up, but grew around the saguaros directly under it, as if saying: I got you… It was what’s known as a nurse tree or plant.
“So we know that the cactus needs sun and water to grow, but it needs something else very special in order to be able to grow in the desert.”
The Sabino Canyon Volunteer Naturalists, a Tucson nonprofit, made a video about nurse trees — native ones like mesquites, ironwoods or palos verdes — and the baby saguaros that are only 5 or 6 inches tall, right next to their trunks.
“The plants that you see around the saguaro are called nurse plants. Just like a nurse helps a patient in the hospital, a nurse plant provides shade, moisture and nice rich soil for the saguaro cactus to grow.”
And as the saguaro grows and becomes more acclimated to the desert sun, the nurse tree ends up with fewer resources and, eventually, it dies. But afterwards, it continues to support the saguaro while fertilizing the ground for future saplings.
On a recent hike, we saw a big and expansive palo verde with five or more baby saguaros under its care. When they grow up, they’ll be what’s called a saguaro forest. And the palo verde is a super nurse tree, as our daughter used to say.
This piece includes audio from the BBC Sound Effects and the Sabino Canyon Volunteer Naturalists.
Encounters is a serial column exploring life and landscape during the climate crisis.
