Early BESW discoveries

by Bob Harms email-here

S. B. Buckley's 1866 discovery of B. swaseyi

Buckley writes (1870):

There is another Berberry of rare occurrence in Hays county, in western Texas, which has large berries, larger than those of any other Barberry with which I am acquainted. (p. 14)
I found this rare shrub with ripe fruit about the first of June in 1866. I think it is an undescribed species and call it Berberis Swaseyii, or Swasey's Berberry, in honor of my friend, Dr. Swasey, the well known editor of the Southern Horticulturist.(p. 15)

E. N. Plank's visit to southern Hays County

Plank somewhat romanticizes his 1893 trip from San Marcos into the hill country (p. 332):

While at San Marco I learned incidentally, that a species of Berberis was growing in the northern part of Hays County, very unlike B. trifoliata. ... I concluded to visit the locality and examine the growing plants. The mail man kindly offered me a pass over the route in his hack, but he assured me that it would be the roughest ride that I had ever taken, and that I would have to pass through Purgatory on the way. But what are fifteen miles of rocky road, and even Purgatory itself, when a new plant or an old lost one is to be found.
... We made one halt to leave the mail at Purgatory Post Office and one more to regale ourselves with the luscious ripe dewberries that were abundant by the roadside. The road was fully as bad as my friend had described it. But Purgatory was only a pleasant and fertile valley, among the sterile hills, covered with fields of growing Corn and Cotton. A small creek that waters the valley, bears the same unmeaning name, which had probably been given to the valley by some pessimistic early settler, whose dreams of success had never grown into realities. Just beyond the valley, on the slope of the mountain, we found one Barberry. ... At the time of my visit, during the later days of April, the plants were bearing nearly ripe fruit. ...
Perdinalis River is thirty or forty miles north of the station that I have mentioned.

The map below, shows very clearly Plank's Purgatory area, on the Hays—Comal county line, immediately east of the Devil's Backbone, some 12 miles from San Marcos.

Robert T. Hill and T. Wayland Vaughan at the Frio Waterhole, c. 1897

In their Geology of the Edwards Plateau and the Rio Grande Plain adjacent to Austin and San Antonio, Texas, with reference to the occurence of underground waters (1898), Hill and Vaughan established the westernmost known population of B. Swaseyi. In footnote 1, p. 211, they present the following:

In the lower slopes, around the headwaters of the Frio (Frio water hole), the writers last year discovered a large area of the edible Berberis swaseyi Buckley, a species which Coulter says in his Flora of West Texas is known only from the canyons of the Pedernalis. The fruit of this plant is a large edible berry well worthy of cultivation. We have never seen it elsewhere.