By OMAR ZAPATA
Years before sort of documented history, the Montezuma cypress was abundant all along the Rio Grande Valley, from Brownsville all the way up to the upper Valley, and a nursery project is trying to bring native species back to abundance.
In May, a grant of $1,000 was given to the Brownsville Parks & Recreation Department by the South Texas Center for Historical and Genealogical Research to create a horticultural nursery for the Montezuma cypress to allow for the development of a tree inventory with the dream of the reforestation of the species in the Rio Grande Valley.
The grant was specifically given to the Brownsville Wellness Coalition for the Montezuma cypress incubator project at the La Posada Community Garden in Southmost Brownsville.
The Montezuma cypress is native to parts of Mexico, Guatemala, the Rio Grande Valley and usually appears in swamps, streams and riverbanks at sea level, according to wildflower.org. The tree was sacred to the Aztecs and was the favorite tree of Aztec emperor Montezuma. Once abundant in the Valley before colonization, most of the population was used for lumber, according to Eugene Fernandez, director of the South Texas Center for Historical and Genealogical Research.
“These beautiful trees were scalped from the horizon from the Spaniards that came through in the 1500s and 1600s … they list that there were tens of thousands of them,” he said.
The nonprofit is geared toward historical research management and educating the public on these projects.
“The intention here is to number one, bring about an awareness of this particular tree because a lot of people say, ‘ what the heck is that? A Montezuma cypress?’” he said.
Fernandez said the Montezuma cypress project is something he has been working toward for the last 15 years.
The name of the tree nursery is “Xoxotla Llhuicatl,” which is Nahuatl for radiant garden of heaven. Construction of the project began June 10 and was completed on July 8. He hopes the nursery will be the center for the reforestation of the tree in South Texas and for anywhere else looking to cultivate the Montezuma cypress.
Xoxotla Llhuicatl is located at 1325 La Posada Drive. Posada sits right next to a drained resaca where about 40 Montezuma cypress trees remain, some being over 300 years old, according to Fernandez.
The land previously owned by a Frenchman, Philistine Jagou in the 1800s, was a plantation which Fernandez said “was like a garden of Eden” that had all kinds of fruit tress, wine grapes, cork trees and Montezuma cypress.
A restoration of an old bridge by Fernandez that Jagou built had the Resaca drained which killed about 13 Montezuma cypress trees over a span of eight years.
Fernandez said the future plan is to put water back into the resaca and have it be part of the reservoir system for Brownsville which will also help grow new Montezuma cypress trees.
The nursery with plans to grow larger at the community garden as the years go by to produce more trees, already has a handful of two-year-old trees ready to be planted and seedlings coming along the way.
With the Montezuma cypress seeds maturing in Aug.-Sept., the new generation of seeds will soon be collected.
With Fernandez already planting about a dozen trees throughout the city, it will take about 150 years to reach full growth.
“I can’t tell you how gratifying it is to be sitting here in a home for the cypresses and also the prospect of generating and propagating more of them,” he said. “It is a true goal, particularly of a lifetime for me to have this come to fruition.”
With the main goal of the project to reintroduce the Montezuma cypress to the Valley, any profits from commercial sales of the trees will go back to the Wellness Coalition, the nursery and the South Texas Center for Historical and Genealogical Research.
