Salt Cedars

Recently, I was a host for a Garden Tour Fund Raiser and overheard some say, they found the greatest cedar trees with pink flowers and were so hardy and selling at a local nursery in the Arlington area.  I thought, surely not salt cedars, because they fit the exact description they were talking about.

If this is true, the nursery owners need to be arrested immediately.  Southeastern New Mexico and along the Pecos River are covered with Salt Cedars.  A hardy arid cedar tree that zaps the water from the ground and leaves the ground all around salty.  In fact, you can see the salt reflect from the dirt in the sunlight and if you touch the dirt and taste it, it is salty!  What prompted me to write was a recent trip to Carlsbad NM via Big Springs and Lamesa area.  As a child I never recall seeing salt cedars in Texas anywhere but Pecos and the river.  Now they are all along the gullies up to Big Spring, Tx.  Anyone who remembers John Towers, State Senator, long deceased, may recall that his campaign in the Odessa Permian area was to get rid of Salt Cedars.  He did not, but I think millions of dollars has been spent on the eradication to no avail.  If people start planting these weeds, comparable to KUDZU, in the Metroplex, and particularly on the golf courses water ways, as they planned to do, it will be a bad introduction of yet another weed we will be fighting forever.  The Country Club and Golf Course Maintenance won't know what hit them.

  Search Library Topics      Search Newspaper Columns