Gentry's Rio Mayo Plants: The Tropical Deciduous Forest and Environs of Northwest Mexico (Southwest Center Series)

For anyone interested in the vegetation of Sonora, Mexico this book is a must! Back in the early 1980s I was very fortunate to be able to buy a copy of the original Smithsonian book published in 1942 and this current version is a wonderful update of that earlier work. The new book includes additional plant accounts from years of plant collecting in southeast Sonora by botanists at the University of Arizona in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. The authors are careful to keep Gentry's original accounts in parentheses.Gentry spent a considerable amount of time traveling in the Alamos region of southeast Sonora during the late 1930s and during these travels he collected interesting information concerning the local names and medicinal uses of the plants of southern Sonora. In reading the plant descriptions and associated plant habitats you can almost envision the plant growing and flowering in its native habitat. This book is nicely complimented by "Sonoran Desert Plants" and "The Trees of Sonora, Mexico" which look with greater depth into the larger plants and trees of Sonora.

I was given the opportunity to catalog Dr. Gentry's herbarium collection at the Desert Botanical Garden in 1987-88. I haven't seen the new edition mentioned here, but read the original work at the time I was cataloging his herbarium specimens. Through it, I was able to share his experience as an explorer in the spirit of John Wesley Powell, someone who knew that the American southwest is best delineated by watersheds, not along false lat/long lines. I met Dr. Gentry a couple of times, and remember the occasions well. Last time I saw him, when I was cataloging his collection, I overheard a conversation between him and a consultant for the Fort McDowell Indian Community. The consultant was asking about desert-adapted crop plants. Dr. Gentry went into great detail describing many desert plants suited to agriculture - tepary beans, jojoba, Lippia (Mexican oregano), agave, chiltepines, gum arabic, etc. I learned a lot just by eavesdropping. The consultant listened, but did not hear the words. He recommended that the Fort McDowell people plant cotton. Not because it was best suited to desert agriculture - far from that. They planted cotton because it needs vast quantities of water. They did not want the best desert-adapted crops. What they wanted, instead, was the best crop for wasting water, so that they could establish valid rights to the water. Worse, I watched them clear off vast acreages of mesquite forests to make room for the water-wasting cotton crop. The Hopi call this koyaanisqatsi. This book should help folks in southwestern north America realize that we have a bounteous resource, if we can only learn to use it.