Meangreen94z wrote: ↑Tue Feb 06, 2024 4:04 pm
I will keep 2-3 initially but plan to phase other species in to replace them. They are the dominant species in Central Texas and choke everything else out. I have a Live Oak in the rear and 2 in the front. I will keep those.
Meangreen94z wrote: ↑Tue Feb 06, 2024 4:04 pm
I will keep 2-3 initially but plan to phase other species in to replace them. They are the dominant species in Central Texas and choke everything else out. I have a Live Oak in the rear and 2 in the front. I will keep those.
I think that culture may have disappeared, or atleast the heritage is no longer celebrated. My new house is right outside the Balcones Canyonlands. I’ve never heard of it.
Actually it isn't the same article. Here's the full text of the article:
Meet the Unruly Clan That Once Ruled the Hill Country
Living hard and free, cedar choppers clashed with respectable townsfolk in the mid-20th century.
Wes Ferguson
By Wes Ferguson
August 2020
Today, expensive homes dot the hills of Austin’s western fringe. But there was a time, not so long ago, when respectable townspeople avoided the highlands just outside the city. There, along the Balcones Escarpment, the geological fault zone marking the eastern edge of the Edwards Plateau, a reclusive folk known as cedar choppers lived hard and free on the rugged terrain, and polite company kept its distance.
Austin native Ken Roberts was ten or eleven the first time he encountered the children of cedar choppers, at the low-water crossing of the Colorado River below the Lake Austin dam sometime in the mid-fifties. “I remember how different from us they looked,” he writes in his 2018 book The Cedar Choppers: Life on the Edge of Nothing (Texas A&M University Press). “They were barefoot, their pants were too short, their shirts ragged. These were not kids you would see in Austin.”
The boys set Roberts on edge, and when his friend Dudley taunted them, one of them pulled out a club. Roberts and Dudley ran.
“Who are these people?” he wondered.
Roberts, a retired economics professor at Southwestern University, in Georgetown, answers his own question in The Cedar Choppers. Based largely on interviews and newspaper archives, the book is in its fifth printing, an impressive run for an academic title; its popularity attests, perhaps, to modern Central Texans’ fascination with a group of people they replaced: a marginalized yet proudly independent band of Southern whites whose lineage stretches back to a Scotch-Irish warrior culture in the British Isles.
The mountain clans that would come to be known as the cedar choppers, or cedar whackers, first settled in Appalachia in the eighteenth century, moving west through the Ozarks before finding their way to Central Texas shortly after the Civil War. An earlier wave of German and Anglo settlers had already established farms throughout the Hill Country, but their intensive tilling and overgrazing practices quickly depleted the region’s thin topsoil, allowing Ashe juniper—a shrubby tree known colloquially as mountain cedar—to spread out of the region’s steep canyons and across disturbed rocky slopes where native grass once grew. By the turn of the twentieth century, most of the wealthy farmers had moved on to greener pastures.
The mountain folk didn’t have much to begin with, and they were well suited for the woodlands, so they hunkered down. For generations, they eked out a meager existence hunting, fishing, stocking semi-feral pigs and cattle, distilling moonshine, and cutting cedar, which they used to build zigzagging “worm fences” and rustic barns or burned to sell as charcoal. As the nature writer John Graves explains in his 1973 essay collection Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land, “The cedar people asked less of the land and of life than those who had come before; the land had much less to give.”
The mountain folk represented but a sliver of the Scotch-Irish people who settled in Texas, of course. “Isolation allowed them to keep their ways,” Roberts says. As the already clannish cedar choppers further withdrew from society, they became ever more insular. Folklorist Alan Lomax encountered cedar chopper families in the thirties and recorded them singing traditional English ballads like “The Romish Lady” and “Seven Long Years.” They had their own manner of speaking, distinct from their fellow Texans, and lived by a code of freedom and personal honor. “There was a lot of murder and mayhem going on,” Roberts says, “but they wouldn’t steal.”
That culture—defined by a warrior ethic, stubborn pride, a distrust of legal institutions, and a lilting dialect—is an ancient one that developed on lands bordering the Irish Sea, according to the 1989 book Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, which traces the influence of successive waves of immigration from the British Isles on regional cultures in the United States. Distinctive words like “bumfuzzled” and “scoot” and the use of an emphatic double negative—“I never sold none,” for example—as well as the figurative use of earthy terms for bodily functions, all arose in the borderlands of Northern Ireland, the Lowlands of Scotland, and northern Britain. “A backcountry granny would kindly say to a little child, ‘Ain’t you a cute little shit,’ ” Albion’s Seed author David Hackett Fischer writes.
More than a quarter million Scotch-Irish people immigrated to America through much of the 1700s. Many were desperately poor, Fischer notes. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the cedar choppers’ fortunes took a fateful turn. Ranches had begun to replace farms in agrarian Texas, and cattle required fences to keep them from roaming free. Cedar was in high demand for fence posts, and the hill people, newly incentivized, began cutting cedar at a prodigious rate and hauling it on flatbed trucks across Texas, the Great Plains, and the West, where it commanded top dollar. By the forties, Roberts writes, the once-impoverished people were flush with cash, and the name “cedar choppers” came into use. “They were making more money than any working man in Austin. That’s just astounding to me,” Roberts says. “They could make $25 a day when it might take a typical working man a week to make that much money. And they had no boss.”
Most cedar choppers didn’t use their riches to improve their long-term fortunes, however. Roberts says many of them preferred to live for the moment, eating “high on the hog” and drinking heavily. “They didn’t care about possessions,” he says, “and they lived in housing fit for animals.”
In the early twentieth century, cedar choppers were more widely known as charcoal makers; they burned so much cedar on the banks of the Guadalupe River that an entire section of river from Sisterdale to New Braunfels was nicknamed Charcoal City.
Old-timers in the Hill Country still tell stories about the cedar choppers, many involving violence and booze (though Roberts makes clear in his book that the rowdiest men were a minority; most of the choppers were content to lead quiet lives). One descendant of the cedar choppers interviewed by Roberts recalled wild Saturday nights in Junction, where he saw three fights happening at once, with his father in the middle of the melee. “Yeah, my daddy—hell, he’d get on a mule and ride ten miles to get in a fistfight,” the man said. (Cedar choppers also play a starring role in one of Texas Monthly’s most outrageous stories, a 1975 Gary Cartwright narrative about dogfights, which opens with a cedar chopper stabbing a convenience store clerk after an argument over a 5-cent increase in the price of a six-pack of beer.)
Though people throughout Central Texas were scared of the cedar choppers, nowhere did their nineteenth-century ways collide more forcefully with proper society than in Austin, where life revolved around the state capitol and the University of Texas. When they arrived in the forties and fifties with cedar posts in tow and thirsty for rowdy nights in bars on Sixth Street, they shocked middle-class residents, according to Roberts. The men were filthy from tree sap, which stuck to their skin and mingled with sweat and dust from cedar bark. “They lived like hell and played like hell,” Roberts recalls. “They weren’t ashamed of it.” And if you looked down on them, he adds, they’d kick your butt.
Austin’s elites, despite their fears—or perhaps because of them—responded to the presence of cedar choppers with ridicule. One country club hosted a “Hill Country Cedar Chopper”–themed dance, replete with hillbilly costumes and fake beards. Cedar choppers also entered the region’s folklore as bogeymen, featured in the kinds of scary stories told around a crackling campfire. The term “cedar chopper” became a catchall pejorative for the region’s hillbillies, not unlike “Okie” in California and “cracker” in Georgia. Today, the equivalent term would be “white trash” or “redneck.”
Of course, the cedar choppers’ heyday couldn’t last. By the middle of the twentieth century, after chain saws replaced double-bladed axes, nearly anyone was able to fell cedar with relative ease. Even more ruinous was the arrival around the same time of steel T-posts, the metal fence posts imported from Japan that quickly replaced cedar posts. Technology put nearly all the cedar choppers out of business, says Roberts, who spent his academic career researching the effects of economic change on marginalized rural people in Mexico and China, before turning his attention to the marginalized folks closer to home. “By 1960,” Roberts writes, “most of the choppers had left the hills, moving reluctantly into town and working as truckers or masons or at any job where they could maintain some semblance of independence.”
Today, only a few professional cedar choppers live alongside the vacationers, retirees, and ranchette owners who predominate in the hills west of the Balcones Escarpment. “This country’s growing over way too quick out here,” cedar chopper Nolan Allen lamented on a recent morning outside his home near the foot of the Devil’s Backbone ridge, south of Wimberley, where the exurban sprawl envelops a patch of land his family has owned for more than a century.
Nolan is no bogeyman. An affable 28-year-old with a burly physique and a handshake as rough as tree bark, he bought his first chain saw, an Echo CS-3000, when he was eleven years old to cut posts alongside his father, Stanley. “It’s something we love to do,” Nolan said. “Get out in the brush, and you can’t hear your phone ring and you’re by yourself. It’s more or less therapy, I guess you’d say. Nice and quiet, except for the chain saw, but you tune that out after a minute.”
There’s still some demand for cedar posts, and the Allens work hard to meet it. “I can cut one of them in four or five minutes,” Nolan said. He also cuts smaller sections called “stays,” which are used as fence pickets. A stay is five feet long, which Nolan measures by standing it upright and cutting it off where it reaches his shirt pocket. (His dad cuts each stay at a height between his first and second shirt button.)
One time, a man confronted the Allen brothers with a baseball bat. “Clayton fired up that brand-new chain saw and said, ‘You done brought a bat to a chain saw fight, mister,’ ” Nolan said, guffawing.
Along with Nolan’s younger brother, Clayton, the Allens work out deals with neighboring landowners who allow them to harvest the trees free of charge. “Generally what we do is we’ll cut the cedar, and then we’ll clean the brush and trim the trees and make everything look pretty,” Nolan said. If they had to pay to harvest posts and stays, he says, they wouldn’t be able to turn a profit—cedar posts fell even further out of favor about a decade ago, when prices for steel posts plummeted. These days, he said, the only people who prefer cedar fences are set in their ways, live in coastal areas where steel erodes quickly, or simply like the Hill Country aesthetic.
Nolan’s dad, Stanley, a friendly fellow in a threadbare work shirt and paint-spattered jeans, tells meandering stories in a singsongy twang that could pass for Appalachian mountain talk. He was a teenager in the early seventies, he said, when he bought a chain saw at a garage sale for his own father, who was about sixty years old and had always used a double-bit ax. “I was tired of watching him chopping all damn day,” Stanley recalled. “I drove in there, and Daddy’s out there sharpening that old ax. I got out the saw, and he said, ‘What the hell is that?’ ”
“It’s your present,” Stanley told him.
“I don’t want that damn thing,” came the reply.
“Well, you got it anyway,” Stanley said. The old man was stubborn. It took him a long time to come around to the chain saw. “He was a tough old fart, is all I can say,” Stanley recalled.
Like their warrior clan forebears, the Allens tell plenty of stories about not backing down from confrontations that erupt when they’re chopping cedar, particularly when property lines are in dispute. One woman sicced her dog on the brothers (the dog apparently didn’t know what “Sic ’em” meant; it ran around but didn’t attack). Another time, a man confronted them with a baseball bat. “Clayton fired up that brand-new chain saw and said, ‘You done brought a bat to a chain saw fight, mister,’ ” Nolan said, guffawing.
Nolan shrugged off the dangers inherent in working with gas-powered, razor-sharp saws. “We’ve had a few close calls, but nothing bad,” he said, proceeding to describe a friend who nearly cut his own hand off. Another time, about a decade ago, Nolan tripped on a piece of barbed wire. “When I tried to throw the saw out from under me, it caught my knee and chewed it up,” he said. “I could actually see my kneecap in there. I rubbed Purell in it, tied a Band-Aid around it, and kept going.” A friend told him he should seek immediate medical treatment, but Nolan didn’t think it could be stitched up, and he didn’t want to miss work. “It was pretty gnarly-looking,” he said of the scar, “but it’s about gone now.”
Nolan has heard the scary stories about cedar choppers that have been circulating in the Hill Country for generations. He thinks the legends grew because he and his brethren have such imposing physiques. “You spend all day carrying a chain saw or carrying post, and everybody’s built,” he said. “Like me, I’m kind of round, but I can pick up four hundred pounds and walk off with it, all from cutting cedar and firewood.”
The Allens admit they’re among a dying breed. “We’re narrowed down here, but we make the best of it,” Stanley said. For Ken Roberts, though, the cedar choppers’ presence is as vivid now as it was when he first encountered them, more than six decades ago. “It’s like they were from another country, another language, another culture,” he says. “And only people who live along the Balcones Fault know who the hell they were. Nobody else does.”
This article appeared in the August 2020 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “The Edge Dwellers.” Subscribe today.
A few updates, Im putting the larger trees, palms, and Yucca in ground. Far from what it will look finished . For those who asked in the past for a comparison of Yucca rostrata vs thompsoniana, here are a couple pictures.
Roldana petasitis is actually a low water needy cloud forest plant. I wouldn't call it drought tolerant though. Great for dryish shade..like Monstera is.
Stan wrote: ↑Mon Feb 26, 2024 9:34 am
Roldana petasitis is actually a low water needy cloud forest plant. I wouldn't call it drought tolerant though. Great for dryish shade..like Monstera is.
It looks like elves might come running out from there. How did your Dendrosis and those palms I sent fair? Any pictures?
An update. A bed against the house with a number of palms. Brahea armata, Brahea moorei, and Chamaerops humilis v. argentea/Cerifera all were survivors in 2021 at a decent percentage. Brahea calcarea ‘blue’ and Brahea edulis will survive most years. Yucca periculosa, filfera, and queretaroensis x filifera will get tried out. I’m thinking periculosa, which burns in the teens(F) in containers ,probably won’t be viable. But I grew them from seed and have a few to spare. A high elevation form of Trichocereus pasacana with dense spines, and Soehrensia formosa are other additions. Mixed in are Mimosa borealis, Calliandra eriophylla, Leucophyllum frutescens, Fouquieria splendens, Dasylirion wheeleri, Nolina matapensis, Opuntia spinosibacca, Opuntia aciculata, Puya , an Arbutus xalapensis seedling and others.
Stan wrote: ↑Wed Oct 03, 2018 11:21 am
San Francisco's climate is so underrated..even by me. I wouldn't doubt in the Mission District there are 20' Mango tree's with fruit on them. Tropical plants take to the climate better then people. Its just amazing what "L.A. Plants" can be found growing there.
Hi friend
San Francisco's climate indeed surprises with its suitability for tropical flora. The Mission District likely hosts lush greenery, showcasing the city's diverse microclimates and its knack for nurturing unexpected botanical treasures.
The palms are fine and looking forward to the warmth of spring when they can green up better. I should have posted them in November. The Agaves are in front doing their Agave thing= pup. They look good under the Brahea. The Dendropsis is a bit sad looking. I have to plant it in ground. It's more touchy than I thought it would be.
Meangreen94z wrote: ↑Mon Feb 26, 2024 8:54 pm
An update. A bed against the house with a number of palms. Brahea armata, Brahea moorei, and Chamaerops humilis v. argentea/Cerifera all were survivors in 2021 at a decent percentage. Brahea calcarea ‘blue’ and Brahea edulis will survive most years. Yucca periculosa, filfera, and queretaroensis x filifera will get tried out. I’m thinking periculosa, which burns in the teens(F) in containers ,probably won’t be viable. But I grew them from seed and have a few to spare. A high elevation form of Trichocereus pasacana with dense spines, and Soehrensia formosa are other additions. Mixed in are Mimosa borealis, Calliandra eriophylla, Leucophyllum frutescens, Fouquieria splendens, Dasylirion wheeleri, Nolina matapensis, Opuntia spinosibacca, Opuntia aciculata, Puya , an Arbutus xalapensis seedling and others.
IMG_9729.jpeg
Permanent homes for all the plants! Hooray!
It looks like things are pretty closely planted, do you hope they’ll grow together a bit?
I tend to overplant quite a bit with the expectation that I’ll lose plenty of plants to winter. Are these the tenderest plants for you, hence the proximity to the house?
The T.pasacana are an upgrade from T.terscheckii as the latter looks more like a large pickle than a cactus. Interesting to find out the growth rate on the Pasacanas.
Meangreen94z wrote: ↑Mon Feb 26, 2024 8:54 pm
An update. A bed against the house with a number of palms. Brahea armata, Brahea moorei, and Chamaerops humilis v. argentea/Cerifera all were survivors in 2021 at a decent percentage. Brahea calcarea ‘blue’ and Brahea edulis will survive most years. Yucca periculosa, filfera, and queretaroensis x filifera will get tried out. I’m thinking periculosa, which burns in the teens(F) in containers ,probably won’t be viable. But I grew them from seed and have a few to spare. A high elevation form of Trichocereus pasacana with dense spines, and Soehrensia formosa are other additions. Mixed in are Mimosa borealis, Calliandra eriophylla, Leucophyllum frutescens, Fouquieria splendens, Dasylirion wheeleri, Nolina matapensis, Opuntia spinosibacca, Opuntia aciculata, Puya , an Arbutus xalapensis seedling and others.
IMG_9729.jpeg
Permanent homes for all the plants! Hooray!
It looks like things are pretty closely planted, do you hope they’ll grow together a bit?
I tend to overplant quite a bit with the expectation that I’ll lose plenty of plants to winter. Are these the tenderest plants for you, hence the proximity to the house?
It’s a mixture as far as hardiness, but yes things like Yucca periculosa, Nolina matapensis, and Brahea edulis will need help during a bad winter. I planted somewhat close. I plan on losing a few things, others will mostly grow upwards, and I eventually plan on grouping things together once they do grow upwards, for protection. The only plants that can’t be relocated later are the Brahea due to root sensitivity. My other beds further back will be partially grouped by Northern Chihuahuan Desert, Sonoran Desert, and then other species of Mexico . The South American species will get mixed in randomly among those groups . It won’t be anywhere near 100% accurate but I want some similarity to what you see in habitat.
Stan wrote: ↑Wed Feb 28, 2024 9:26 am
The T.pasacana are an upgrade from T.terscheckii as the latter looks more like a large pickle than a cactus. Interesting to find out the growth rate on the Pasacanas.
They are hard to come by compared to terscheckii. Luckily I came across someone selling cuttings from California
Paul S wrote: ↑Wed Feb 28, 2024 11:25 am
Mine grow between 4" and 8" a year, depending upon the season. You can see the growth bumps on the stems
5.01.jpg
I have terscheckii, tarijensis, valida, tacaquirensis, taquimbalensis and other forms of pasacana/atacamensis as well.They will be going in other parts of the yard. You need to post more pictures of yours, they have been a great inspiration.
I am starting to learn that with the new crazy night time summer heat, those kind of South American species have a really tough time. Lost my chiloensis over the summer and my terscheckii barely scraped through trying but I think due to my timely intervention not getting crown rot. tarijensis croaked out on me well prior to the really extreme summers, but I have a cutting going in deep deep shade that so far looks like it is OK, but if it ever outgrows that shade, it could be toast.
deserticola has been OK, but that is one of the more lower growing species maybe with actual more true Echinopsis genes which seem to be more willing to deal with the summer heat - a lot of the hybrids I have got stressed but tended to pull through, so in the ground most will go.
The most unperturbed by the summer night time heat where the chollas... of course, and a tiny bit more surprising my Cardons... those were tanks this summer.
And to my great frustration another plant that had little issue with the high night time heat: Bermuda grass... one of these days I will get it all killed..... maybe...
mcvansoest wrote: ↑Wed Feb 28, 2024 1:23 pm
I am starting to learn that with the new crazy night time summer heat, those kind of South American species have a really tough time. Lost my chiloensis over the summer and my terscheckii barely scraped through trying but I think due to my timely intervention not getting crown rot. tarijensis croaked out on me well prior to the really extreme summers, but I have a cutting going in deep deep shade that so far looks like it is OK, but if it ever outgrows that shade, it could be toast.
deserticola has been OK, but that is one of the more lower growing species maybe with actual more true Echinopsis genes which seem to be more willing to deal with the summer heat - a lot of the hybrids I have got stressed but tended to pull through, so in the ground most will go.
The most unperturbed by the summer night time heat where the chollas... of course, and a tiny bit more surprising my Cardons... those were tanks this summer.
And to my great frustration another plant that had little issue with the high night time heat: Bermuda grass... one of these days I will get it all killed..... maybe...
We obviously don’t get as hot, but I’ve found Soehrensia formosa and Denmoza rhodacantha definitely need to be in partial shade during months of 100°F+ and sun. Eventually they cook. I have two Soehrensia formosa close my house for that reason, they should get atleast half day shade and eventually get additional shade from nearby palms, etc.
Meangreen94z wrote: ↑Wed Feb 28, 2024 11:43 am
You need to post more pictures of yours, they have been a great inspiration.
Thank you! My struggle with the climate here is completely different to your struglles so it is hard to compare. I'll maybe post a couple of pics later.
Paul S wrote: ↑Thu Feb 29, 2024 7:37 am
Couple of pics
Holy crap, that is a beautiful setup.
What is the plant behind/left of the ovatifolia in 3.01?
What agave is that that has bloomed in 3.12?
What about the cactus in 1.01?
I have always been borderline on palm type plants; I like them in some settings but not others. And was unsure in considering placement. I will totally do them dense and layered with other plants like this some day.
