Mother Mesquite
100 Juvenile Honey Mesquite trees and Certificates of Entanglement
2021-
Mother Mesquite is a living work of art dispersed across the City of Lubbock, TX.
The project began 30 miles South of Lubbock, TX in the digestive tract of cattle on a 600-acre ranch in Tahoka, TX. Cows, like humans, love to eat the delicious beans of a Mesquite tree.
In the summer of 2021, a drought year, we collected piles of cow dung containing hundreds of scarified Mesquite seeds. We brought these seeds back to our greenhouse in Lubbock, TX where we germinated 100 Honey Mesquite trees. When the trees turned three, we enacted the second phase of Mother Mesquite, a project that transplanted all 100 of the juvenile Honey Mesquite trees across the City of Lubbock in the Summer of 2024.
Each tree was distributed alongside a Certificate of Entanglement for the Preservation of Mother Mesquite. The trees were given away for free to dozens of families, businesses, the South Plains Food Bank, and At’l Do Farms.
Why Mesquite?
The Honey Mesquite tree arrived north of the Rio Grande river thirteen thousand years ago when the now extinct megafauna of the semi-arid Llano Estacado fostered their dispersal from what we now call Mexico. Over millennia, the Honey Mesquite tree was culturally selected for the edibility of its seed pod and the potency of its medicine by the indigenous people of the Southern Plains—the traditional homelands of the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma, the Cheyanne and Arapaho Tribes, the Comanche Nation, the Jicarilla Apache Nation, the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma, the Mescalero Apache Tribe, and their ancestors.
Historical observations (mid-1800’s) of the Llano Estacado describe it as one continuous Mesquite flat, dotted here and there with open prairie. The Honey Mesquite tree is currently present in West Texas, but mostly in “poorly managed” areas where the tree grows in dense groves. The increased density of Honey Mesquite in these “poorly managed” areas is attributed to the suppression of wildfire, the removal of prairie dogs, and the introduction of domesticated livestock. Due to changes in land management post-colonization and the economic dominance of ranching, industrialized agriculture, urban development, and oil extraction; the Honey Mesquite tree went from being a stewarded cultural resource to becoming perceived as a much maligned ‘native invasive,’ ‘weed,’ ‘noxious,’ ‘pest,’ and ‘nuisance tree.’
Living together in a multispecies world requires that we pay attention to our entanglements with both the human and the more-than-human. The ethnobotanist Enrique Salmon asserts that “life in any environment is viable only when humans view their surroundings as kin; and our roles are essential for the survival of the more-than-human.” The Mother Mesquite project works to strengthen the fragile connections that bind us together—starting with the Honey Mesquite tree. We worked with our neighbors to plant and care for this tree, and in doing so, practice a form of care for the web of interconnectedness with the more-than-human in Lubbock, TX. The Mesquite tree is well adapted for our current and future climate. The Mesquite Tree provides the most with the least amount of resources—shade, food, habitat, medicine, nitrogen and oxygen.