“What do you like about it? Is it the topography, or the wildlife, or something else?” 

It’s a common question when I share with my coworkers how much I love the Tumacacoris and the Atascosas. Coronado National Forest is huge and incredibly diverse, and in the heat of a Sonoran summer most people don’t want to be on these two smaller, lower elevation mountain ranges. They lack the refreshing temperatures of the higher ranges on the Forest. As far as I can tell, the most abundant animals here are cattle. I would advise against swimming in either of the lakes because of heavy metal from mine tailings, waterborne illnesses from grazing, and ample leeches. 

This landscape is hot and humid, winding with canyons, hills, secret swimming holes, and perennial streams. Much of it is not true desert but the Madrean Archipelago, a blend of conifer forest, oak scrub, grassland, and wetland. Humans are everywhere – canyons full of agave scrapers and hand axes, camouflage jackets and plastic bottles from the refugee crisis unfolding on this part of the border, pictographs, abandoned vehicles, and ammo (both modern shell casings and older arrowheads).

It is easy to explain why I love the plants and the animals and the air of this place. It’s harder to explain that love when considered with the heaviness that comes with the task of surveying plants and collecting seeds from these mountains. To a lot of people in Southern Arizona, “Chiricahuas” is a mountain range. To a lot of other people, the Chiricahuas are a nation of Apache people who were forcibly removed as part of a genocide in the mountain ranges who still bear their name. The Huachucas are a mountain range and also the name of a Pima village that was wiped out by settlers. What is considered to be the final battle of the American Indian wars was fought in Bear Valley in the Atascosas. There are trees and lichens alive today who were alive to witness all of this. It is not lost on me that I am harvesting seeds from places with a painful and shameful history. It is not lost on me that this would be true nearly anywhere on the continent.

I don’t have wisdom to offer anyone about this. A land acknowledgement (“I am harvesting seeds on land that traditionally belonged to many different nations, all of whom were treated brutally by the nation we call the United States”) does not seem useful. I thank every plant from whom I harvest seeds (and every plant I collect for herbarium pressing), but I also know every one of these plants is here in these landscapes – landscapes so deeply modified and architected by humans – because of the care of Indigenous people and nations. Indigenous people and nations who are still here, but generally not present at my workplace to provide oversight or input.

On this part of the Coronado, it’s impossible to forget this challenging, painful, complicated history. There is sweet birdsong and beautiful flowers and evident bitterness. Regardless of any land acknowledgement I make, the land asks me every day to acknowledge that my work here is fraught. The pictographs, the arrowheads, the cattle, the border wall – every day I am asked to remember who was here and who is here and who might be here next. I don’t love all of it, but I’m grateful for the opportunity to be here and witness it, and maybe work toward human justice in this place that has been sculpted by so many human hands. To me, that is a type of love.

“Bloom where you’re planted,” you whisper to the water lily seed as you cast her into the sweet rich earth of a tallgrass prairie, no open water in sight.

A foundational idea in seed collecting is the existence of seed transfer zones: regions within which plants can be transferred with a great likelihood of successful propagation. Sure, hoary tansyaster – Machaeranthera canescens – grows across the West. But evidence shows that seeds collected from North Dakota’s glacial plains are unlikely to survive long in Arizona’s semi-arid highlands. If we’re thoughtful about where a population comes from and the condition to which that population is adapted, we should have a better outcome when reseeding that population in restoration projects.

This idea is challenging for me in our current era. Not the idea of transfer zones; I understand how plants adapt deeply to an ecosystem. Plant species move around pretty slowly all things considered. Birds and bears and other animals scatter their seeds, sure, but they don’t have wings or legs of their own.

Here’s what challenges me. The climate is changing, warming quickly. Precipitation patterns are less reliable. Some of our coworkers in New Mexico are dealing with fires and floods, and others are experiencing the leftovers of Hurricane Beryl. Every month is the hottest month on record. It’s hard to understand what this means for seeds, who have spent millennia adapting to more predictable environments. There is a real possibility that a lot of the species we’re collecting now won’t survive these fast changes, and for me the instability of all of this seems like it would really impact the idea of a transfer zone.

But there, dense bunches of threeawn grass growing densely through cracks in the hot Tucson asphalt. Bushes of mock vervain erupting in the rubble where Southwestern canyons were detonated for mining projects or to build the border wall. Cheerful sunflower – never a species to be contained – filling up the highway margins and spilling down the railroad easements. Understanding where a plant can thrive, in which conditions a species can survive, is far beyond my job description and personal intellect.

There’s probably some wisdom here about how we’re all in our own version of transfer zones, with places where we are more likely to grow and thrive, and places that would wither us immediately. I’ll leave you to decide what this analogy means for you. I’m personally very excited to be in the Sonoran Desert, where ferns grow next to cacti and yucca, where I can grow in my experiences of plant identification and understanding the diverse ecosystems of the Coronado National Forest (which has low desert and alpine forest and oak scrubland and everything in between). I can’t be sure, but I think I’m planted somewhere I’ll bloom.