Mild's website on LRGV, Texas native plants is:
www.riodeltawild.com
Publication:The Monitor;
Date:Feb 4, 2007 ;
Section:Valley Life;
Page Number:15E
COMMENTARY
Local woman champions
native plants, volunteerism
By BOB POWELL
Christina Mild kneels beside a Passion flower as she explains that it is a food for the caterpillar of the Gulf Fritillary. Several of these brilliant orange butterflies have been flitting about as we’ve walked the trails of RamseyNaturePark in Harlingen. She gets excited when she turns over a leaf and finds first one of the multicolored caterpillars, then another and another.
“This has been planted here, where it’s easy for school groups to see and learn about the life cycle of butterflies,” she says.
Educating people, especially children, to the needs of wildlife and the conservation of our natural world are goals she has been involved with a good part of her life. With a degree from Southern Illinois University, Mild has taught biology and physical sciences at schools in Albuquerque (New Mexico), Houston and Brownsville (at PorterHigh School). During the early 1990s she assisted with science and computer education at St. Albans Episcopal Day School when her daughter was a student there.
“I especially enjoyed teaching ‘Super Summer Science,’” Mild recalls. “My daughter Cortney was my teaching and planning assistant. We had lots of fun! At that time, few materials were available to teach students about our local flora and fauna. Finding and developing those materials became a life goal for me.”
Mild’s volunteer history includes involvement with the Rio Grande Valley Museum in Harlingen where she developed and taught beginning bird watching for children, a fiveweek course for adults introducing local native plants and the animals that depend upon them titled “Walk on the Wild Side” and a month of nature-related talks and displays during May 2005.
As she stands and brushes the dirt from a pant leg, Mild adds that plants like this Passion flower give visitors ideas of what to plant in their own yards to attract butterflies. Trees, shrubs, grasses, vines and wildflowers, native plants of all kinds, are the theme of this park. Designated as a nature park in honor of esteemed former mayor Hugh Ramsey, the park suffered years of illegal dumping. It lies along a bend of the Arroyo Colorado River south of Harlingen’s airport. Mild and her husband, Chuck, have a home just across the river. What they’ve planted in their backyard mirrors much of what can be found in the park.
“One reason we chose our home is because of the park,” she said. The Mild family enjoys a backyard view of the park, recalling the occasional sighting of an alligator, water snake, regular flybys of the Green Kingfisher and Great Blue herons perching along its riverbank.
Mild has been involved in shaping this land into a showcase for native plants for many years. “My daughter photographed wildflowers in RamseyPark about 14 years ago,” she tells me. “She and I gathered seed and spread it to barren areas in the park. When I worked at ValleyNatureCenter in Weslaco, I carried seed and transplanted cactus cuttings from that nature park to here.
“Birdwatchers from a local church saw me pulling guinea grass along Ramsey’s caliche trail one day and stopped to chat,” Mild tells me. “They became interested in adding plant diversity to the park and eventually involved their entire congregation in planting a diverse garden with easy access from the parking lot. Mike Heep provided the plants and expertise in selecting native species not present in the park. We’ve been able to harvest seed and transplants from that ‘ChurchGarden’ to enhance other areas for several years now. After a good rain, we have more projects in mind than we can shake a stick at! It’s a perfect time to pull guinea grass, transplant from thickly vegetated areas, put in new plants or plant seed. The hardest thing is selecting the few tasks we can actually accomplish before we’re exhausted and the ground is dry.”
Currently, Mild volunteers with the RGV Chapter of Texas Master Naturalists (RGVCTMN), primarily working to increase native plant diversity in the park. RGVCTMN also offers tours on a scheduled basis and whenever requested by interested groups. “Frank Wiseman does the scheduling for us. You can reach him at 364-1410,” Mild adds.
“Mark Conway initiated a major effort to bring additional diversity into the park when he selected RamseyPark as the conservation project for Arroyo Colorado Audubon Society (ACAS),” she explains. That set the stage for other community groups to become involved in enhancing the park.
Clearing out non-native guinea grass is an ongoing project. With help of groups like the Boy Scouts and aid from the city of Harlingen, RamseyNaturePark has been transformed from a place strewn with empty bottles, cans and old tires to a pleasant area to walk, watch for birds and butterflies, and even sit and relaxingly fish along the river bank.
Mild has had experience shaping natural areas with a slant toward education before. From 1996 to 1998 she was the program director of ValleyNatureCenter in Weslaco. She managed its urban thicket, wrote trail guides for adults and children, developed hands-on learning materials and published descriptions of those materials for the Association of Nature Center Administrators. She also taught natural history classes, wrote brochures, edited the newsletter, was a fund-raiser, and organized and led field trips.
Among the classes she developed was a “Wildscaping Walking Tour,” a five-session course on how to landscape a yard using plants native to south Texas that are easy to maintain, add beauty and attract birds and butterflies. She has presented talks on a variety of topics related to “locally-relevant natural history education” and native plants.
From March 2000 to March 2006, Mild wrote a weekly column on native plants titled “Rio Delta Wild,” published in the Saturday edition of the Valley Morning Star. “Now I’m focusing on posting each of those articles on my Web site [www.riodeltawild.com], so that everyone can access them readily on the Internet,” Mild tells me. “I post them in .pdf format, so that they’re readily searchable. It’s possible for me to include as many color photos as I like, since I have complete editorial control!”
As we walk along the trails, Mild constantly points out this plant and that and tells of its usefulness. Occasionally she’ll pull out some non-native grass and even a hardy native. “This is Dicliptera. It tends to easily take over an area,” she says. It’s a plant that grows to a two-foot height and sports red flowers that attract butterflies. She’s pulled a few plants from a place where there’s already a thick tangle of it, and a little further down the trail drops them where she’ll replant them later.
At one point we stop, and with a swing of her arm she points out where one of the theme gardens will be planted. “This is where Medicinal Ridge will be,” she says. It will be a garden highlighting some of the many native herbal and medicinal plants that have been in traditional use in the Valley. Another area will be called Bird Fruit Alley and still another will feature some closely related plants like agaves. Other theme areas include a cactus garden planted by the Arroyo Colorado Audubon Society and one dedicated to Robert Runyon, a self-taught botanist, photographic historian and past mayor of Brownsville. Runyon discovered many previously-unknown plants and several now bear his name. A good many of the plants in the RunyonGarden are rare.
“People give us these plants, knowing they’ll be protected, growing in this park.” Mild explains. “I tend to forget about them, but my friend Diann Ballesteros remembers every tiny plant and makes sure that the most fragile species are watered and cared for.
“Diann Ballesteros and I led the native landscaping tour this fall for the RGV Birding Festival. I enjoyed that tremendously. We selected a series of properties that weren’t included on previous tours. Two properties had frontage on the Arroyo Colorado, giving tour participants a view of the incredible diversity that is present in undisturbed arroyo brush and ideas on how to enhance the wildlife-attracting potential of an established traditional yard. Another yard, surrounded by farm fields, has been wildscaped with a succession of gardens, planted as each grandchild was born into the family. The owner utilizes a water-retaining layer of wet newspaper covered with hay to block out weeds, and soaker hoses for efficient irrigation. She had just begun a new garden, giving our tour group a demonstration of how this cost-effective method is carried out. Her list of bird sightings are ample proof that the wildscape she has created (from an essentially bare lot) is very attractive to resident and migrating birds. This type of tour is very helpful, I think, to those who wish to use their property to benefit wildlife as well as beautify the space they live in. It is my hope that this tour will grow in popularity as each of us learns so much from seeing first-hand what someone else has done, and having the opportunity to question them about their experience.”
As south Texas becomes more urbanized with more native brushland getting cleared and developed, it’s places like Ramsey Nature Park that are among the only areas where our rare plants can find a home. Mild and others often seek out brushland that is about to be cleared, and with the consent of the landowner, they go on rescue missions digging up those plants that are unique, and replanting them in places like RamseyNaturePark. About 80 percent of the plants brought in to this park have been dug up from areas that are now residential housing neighborhoods.
“When I visit McAllen these days, the places where I previously rescued plants and gathered wildflower seeds lie beneath buildings, turf grass and parking lots,” she says. She shakes her head in disbelief, then adds, “We can’t possibly propagate native plants fast enough to keep up with the rate at which they are being lost.”
Mild encourages people to gather seeds from native plants for use in their own yards. As we’ve walked, she’s been filling a small envelope with seeds of the Velvet Lantana, taking a few seeds from each bush that has a lot. This flowering plant is somewhat hardier than many other lantanas and is not only good for wildlife but a nice ornamental too.
Mild and other RGVCTMN volunteers meet at 8:30 a.m. Mondays and Thursdays in the parking lot of Ramsey Nature Park on Ed Carey Drive in Harlingen. They are there until about 11:30 a.m. working on improving the park. Feel free to join them. Bring along a pair of work gloves and drinking water. It’s a good opportunity to meet people who enjoy gardening and learn more about our native plants.
———Bob Powell has been a south Texas naturalist since the mid-1980s, first for the Frontera Audubon Society when they ran the Tram program at Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, then as a Ranger for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge. He began leading Elderhostel birding tours for the University of Texas in the mid-1990s through the Brownsville campus and serves as the site coordinator and head naturalist for the Elderhostel program for the University of Texas Marine Science Center. He is a board member of the Friends of Santa Ana NWR and leads canoe tours on the Rio Grande for them.
———The mission of the Rio Grande Valley Nature Coalition is to preserve the Valley’s native habitat and its inhabitants through education and promotion of the value of our natural resources. For more information, go to http: //www.rgvnaturecoalition.org or www. rgvnaturecoalition.org.