This story originally appeared in bioGraphic.
On a humid May afternoon beneath the shade cloth of the plant nursery on his South Texas ranch, Benito Treviño leaned down, magnifying glasses perched on his nose above an extravagant salt-and-pepper moustache, and used his pen knife to remove a bulbous growth from the top of a baseball-sized, dome-shaped cactus. He sliced the thing over a white paper plate, and dozens of bowl-shaped, red-brown specks spilled out. They were seeds, and with the flat of his blade, Treviño sorted them into piles for counting. Along with the contents of the pods from two other recently pollinated cactuses, there were 265 in all—a good haul to add to the 160 he had collected the day before.
Treviño wrote the date and number on a small paper envelope and, using a teaspoon, scooped the seeds in. At this rate, he would soon have hundreds of star cactuses (Astrophytum asterias) growing here—from newborns not much bigger than the seeds from which they’d germinated to penny-sized buttons three years old to 8- to 10-year-old specimens similar to those that had yielded today’s cache. It was a watershed moment in his efforts to pay back a debt and sow himself a legacy, by recovering South Texas’s endangered plants.
“If there’s something I can do for plants, it’s doing something meaningful for endangered species, like discover how to germinate them so that anyone can germinate them,” Treviño, 71, said. “Hopefully by the time I die, I can say, ‘You know that species? When I was 74, it was endangered, and now it’s common.’” Historically, that was a controversial ambition. The prevailing thinking used to be that humans—particularly ones like Treviño, who hold no university or government title—should leave endangered plants well enough alone. Attitudes have been changing among specialists, though, and Treviño’s story highlights the potential importance of independent naturalists to the work of academics and agencies like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But what that involvement looks like is an evolving question in a field where government regulations run up against heartfelt passion. And in Treviño’s case, the project is not just professional. He’s an ethnobotanist with a unique connection to his chosen mission, a guy who, every day, looks back on his childhood and tells those around him, “Plants like these made it possible for me to survive.”
