Screwbean Mesquite

About the Screwbean Mesquite

The screwbean mesquite - "tornillo" in Spanish - is the mesquite that went for style points. Where the common honey mesquite hangs its seeds in long straight pods, the screwbean twists each pod into a tight, perfect spiral, like a handful of wooden springs. A branch loaded with clustered corkscrew pods, as photographed here, is instantly unmistakable.

It is a tree of the desert Southwest, in Texas found chiefly along the Rio Grande and Pecos drainages, where it lines washes and riverbanks in thickets armed with paired white spines. Fuzzy yellow catkin flowers in spring and early summer feed a crowd of native bees.

Those spiral pods are sweet with sugars, and quail, small mammals, and coyotes all eat them; historically they were ground into meal by Native peoples of the desert rivers, and the dense wood served for tools and fenceposts.

Like many desert-river trees, screwbean has declined in places as rivers were tamed - one more reason a healthy tornillo thicket, buzzing with bees and hung with corkscrews, is worth a photograph.