When you're out hiking in the West Texas desert, encountering the sharp green spikes of sotol or the serrated knife-edges of lechuguilla at every turn, one thought might come to mind: “This landscape has it out for me.” But these very plants that can make the landscape seem forbidding kept people alive and healthy while living in Texas for thousands of years.

Present-day Texans don't rely on sotol or lechuguilla to survive anymore, but we have our own relationships with the botanical world. Michael Jordan (this one doesn't play basketball) is a professor of ethnology at Texas Tech University and an expert in a field called ethnobotany. “It's the study of the relationship between people and plants,” Jordan says. “It's how people utilize botanical resources.”

That love or hate relationship you have with cilantro, that's ethnobotany. Cutting a piece of aloe vera to soothe a burn, that's ethnobotany. So are herbal teas, plant-inspired pharmaceuticals, cotton T-shirts and backyard gardens. Our lives are inextricably tied to plants; I set out on a journey to learn about how folks, historically and currently, engage the world of flora around them.

People of the Lower Pecos

The Lower Pecos Canyonlands encompass parts of Lake Amistad near Del Rio and follow the topography around the Pecos River. Jack Johnson, the National Park Service archeologist for the Amistad National Recreation Area, has spent years studying the lives of the ancient people who resided there.

“In this kind of a dry, semi-arid environment, most of the calories are coming from plant food,” Johnson says. “We think about hunter-gatherers, and we emphasize the hunting part, but really most of the calories are coming from the gathering part. It's all about the plant foods.” The natural world was their pantry.

Johnson describes how these cave inhabitants used sotol, which is found in abundance along the plateaus, mesas and hillsides in the region. Sotol has thick, dagger-like leaves like a yucca, and an impressive stalk when it blooms. The leaves grow from the heart, which rests semi-buried in the soil. The heart is edible but must be baked or steamed. If not, it can be poisonous. Indigenous people trimmed off the dagger leaves of the plant and placed the heart in an earthen oven with heated rocks for two or three days. The heart looks like a large artichoke, and to protect it from burning they placed the thick trimmed leaves of the sotol on the 1,000-degree rocks or utilized prickly pear pads as a barrier and a way to create steam. The cooked leaves of sotol were another source of calories — chewing the leaves produces a subtly sweet juice. When they pulled the heart from the earthen oven, they'd scoop out the mushy center, which they used to make nutrient-rich cakes.

Multipurpose Flora

The Sotol had uses beyond food.

“The uncooked leaves, especially of sotol, are fantastic for weaving baskets and mats,” Johnson explains. “You find them being used like a prehistoric cable tie to bundle something up in a hurry.” The stalks can also be used as a friction fire stick, which Johnson can demonstrate exceptionally well. “I can go from a cold fire-starting kit to a good flame in about 45 seconds on a good day,” Johnson says.

There were so many uses for sotol. I asked Johnson if it could be considered the bison of the plant world, referring to the practice of Indigenous people using all parts of the bison. “Actually, Phil Dering likes to call lechuguilla the bison of the Lower Pecos,” Johnson says. Lechuguilla, sotol and yucca all appear similar (some scientists classify them all in the agave family, while others say sotol is more closely related to beargrass). Of the three, lechuguilla plant fragments show up most frequently in the rock shelters of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands.

Phil Dering is an archeobotanist and ethnobotanist at Texas State University in San Marcos. “The overwhelming evidence from rock shelter deposits and artifacts recovered from those shelters is that lechuguilla was used for both food and to make net, sandals, rope and other food-getting implements,” he says.

Yucca root, too, played a huge part in the rock art that is found in hundreds of sites in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands. The Pecos River style of rock art is known for its five distinctive colors: red, black, yellow, orange and white. Mineral deposits made up the pigment, which was mixed with animal fat. The Indigenous people of the area made a soap from yucca root to thin the paint into a workable consistency.

Renewing Traditional Knowledge

While Yucca, sotol and countless other plants played an essential role in the lives of ancient people, present-day Texans have lost much of our historical connection with native plants. “It's definitely something that's missing, especially in this age of instant gratification,” says Charles Bush, a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe in North Dakota and the regenerative agriculture curriculum developer for the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project (TTBP).

Bush's work aims to bridge that gap. His curriculum teaches traditional knowledge about Texas plants, bringing together indigenous oral traditions, botany and medicine. “Ethnobotany is something that has always been a part of who I am, no matter where I am in this world,” he says.

Bush is currently working on curriculum for TTBP's youth camp, which takes place in November of this year. He's focusing on hands-on activities such as extracting dyes from local plants. “I feel that's the only way that you're going to familiarize yourself with the land — by actually being out in a field and getting your hands dirty and feeling these plants, looking at them, studying them, smelling them, using your senses to encapsulate whatever relationship it is that you need to figure out,” he says.

Bush hopes his work educating people on ethnobotany and regenerative agriculture will rekindle some of the traditional relationships people had with the botanical world. “I take a lot of pride in what I do,” he says. “It's really important for people like me to help bridge this disconnect for the younger ones that are coming after me, and to make it relevant so they can pick up where I'll leave off.”

Useful Wild Plant

Scooter Cheatham, president and founder of the Useful Wild Plants of Texas Project, is also working to reconnect Texans with plants. “People have gotten so alienated from the basic uses of plants they don't even know where [their food] comes from,” Cheatham says. “They go to the store and just buy something off the shelf.”

Cheatham's passion for ethnobotany began in 1971 while he was an undergrad at the University of Texas at Austin. He and a friend were conducting an experiment for their anthropology class. The two attempted to live off Cheatham's grandmother's rural property along the Guadalupe River over spring break. In 10 days, all they caught were one armadillo and one opossum. They couldn't have sustained themselves much longer without knowing which plants around them they could eat. “Our weakness was we didn't have the valuable information about the plants around us,” Cheatham recalls.

That short little expedition set into motion Cheatham's great passion and calling. In 1971 he founded the Useful Wild Plants of Texas Project. Cheatham and others are creating a comprehensive botanical platform to catalog, document and research 5,000 plant species spanning North America and ultimately the more than 400,000 known plant species in the world. The program has produced four volumes of The Useful Wild Plants of Texas, The Southeastern and Southwestern United States, the Southern Plains, and Northern Mexico. These are exhaustively researched books that educate people on the foods, medicines and material goods of the plant kingdom.

Cheatham takes people on hunter-gatherer treks to drive home how important plants are for our everyday survival. “We take people into parts of the state that are so hostile you wouldn't think a lizard could survive,” Cheatham explains. He guides a group for seven to 10 days as they trek across the desert on a private ranch. The treks are conducted in the middle of August, and each participant is limited to a hat, gloves, the clothes on their back and a wool blanket. They are prohibited from taking any type of tool like a knife. The group must make do with what the desert gives them, and one of the most reliable food sources is the sotol. Cheatham utilizes the same techniques that Johnson laid out earlier with the sotol. He removes the leaves with a large flint blade set in a wooden handle to harvest the heart and then cooks it in an earthen oven. It takes up to four days to produce edible carbohydrates from the sotol heart.

“If you're really hungry you don't want to have to wait,” Cheatham says. “So, you have to plan ahead.” I naively ask if prickly pear is a good way to satiate hunger while waiting on your sotol heart. “The problem with prickly pear is it has oxalic acid in it,” he warns. “You eat too much, you'll get sick and throw up.” Nuts and fruits are much more reliable. A good example is Juglans macrocarpa, a tree that grows in West Texas dry creek beds and produces a small walnut.

Lessons on Cheatham's treks are learned quickly, because participants' survival depends on it. “I've tried to teach [people to start fires] back in Austin,” Cheatham says. “They never get a fire.” When he shows them on the hunter-gatherer treks, every member goes on to produce fire. “They pay attention because they need it,” he says. “If we ever hit a wall and don't have food in the grocery store, people will latch on to whatever techniques they can to eat.”

On the Menu

I was fascinated to learn about all the edible properties of sotol and lechuguilla. As I progressed in my plant quest, I also learned that yucca has been a mainstay in French kitchens for decades. Chef Finn Walter utilizes yucca, prickly pear and other native plants to define his High Plains cuisine. His Lubbock restaurant, The Nicolett, is housed in a beautiful red brick structure constructed in the 1920s. The previous resident was a landscape architect, and the property, on the eastern precipice of Lubbock's downtown, abounds with soaptree yuccas, Spanish daggers, century plants and prickly pear.

I sit down with Chef Finn in the property's greenhouse where they host private dinners. Finn defines his concept of The Nicolett, and how it serves his community. “It's essentially my travels, bringing all those things back home, and bridging those things in a way that is palatable to someone from here.” He does that by utilizing plants most folks are familiar with but probably had no idea they could eat. The Peekytoe Crab on the menu is complemented by nopales (cactus) and seasoned with xoconostle (cactus fruit) and a touch of juniper aioli. One of his more popular starches is blanched yucca root, cut into strips and sauteed. Peruse his menu and you'll see a cavalcade of plants: okra flowers, salsify root, mesquite bean and Mexican oregano, which is prolific in the Chihuahuan Desert.

I follow Finn to the beds of yucca, prickly pear and grapevine growing freely along what was once the previous owner's equipment shed. He harvests red blossoms from the yucca, tuna (fruit) from the prickly pear and mustang grapes from the vines. The blossoms are served raw with caviar on spears of yucca leaf. He salt-preserves the prickly pears in a classic Moroccan-style lemon cure with coriander, cinnamon and fennel seed. The grapes are used in a cure for a hiramasa (yellowtail kingfish) dish.

After this journey into the world of ethnobotany and how people relate to plants, I'll never see flora the same. Learning about edible sotol heart, Juglans macrocarpa and the fine cuisine of yucca, I'm hungry to learn more about the natural world around me. I'm just glad I didn't have to eat an armadillo and opossum to catapult me into the wonderful world of plants and their endless bounty.

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