In March of 1982, the entire Gonzales County, Texas, laughed at Margaret Holloway. They laughed at the feed store in Nixon. They laughed at the counter at the Dairy Queen. They laughed in the Methodist Church parking lot after Wednesday evening Bible study. They laughed at the cattle auction in Cuero.
The widow Holloway had gone to a nursery auction in Yoakum and bought four hundred eucalyptus saplings from an Argentine man named Calvin Ruiz for one hundred sixty dollars. She was going to plant every single one. Not along the hedgerow. Not along the fence line. Not near the house. In the middle of the pasture. In the middle of a working cattle pasture.
The men of the county had one word for it. Grief. The woman was grieving. Frank Holloway had died in February of 1980. Heart attack. Forty-three years old. He had left the ranch to his widow. And now the widow was planting decorative trees in the middle of the cow pasture.
The county laughed for three months. Then they laughed for six more years. They stopped laughing in the summer of 1988 when the worst drought in forty years burned through South Texas. When ranchers in four surrounding counties started selling off herds that their grandmothers had built. And when somebody noticed something.
There was one ranch in Gonzales County where the grass was still green. Where the cattle still had shade. Where the trees the whole county had called a joke were in that summer the only thing that made sense across the whole region. Let me take you back six years. Let me show you what she planted. Let me show you who laughed.
At the nursery auction in Yoakum, DeWitt County, Texas, on that Saturday in March of 1982, Calvin Ruiz had the saplings in one-gallon pots lined up on three folding tables at the back of the auction barn. He had been there since six oโclock in the morning. By eleven oโclock, not a single person had stopped at his tables. A few men had walked past and made comments to each other that Calvin pretended not to hear.
Calvin Ruiz had emigrated from Argentina in 1968. He had come to Texas with a single suitcase and seven pounds of eucalyptus seed. He had spent the last fourteen years trying to sell these trees to Texas ranchers without success. That morning in Yoakum, he had decided silently that this would be his last auction. He was going to go home, sell the greenhouse, and stop propagating the species. Fourteen years is too long to keep knocking on a door nobody is going to open.
Margaret Holloway stopped at his tables at 11:15. She asked three questions. He answered them. She wrote him a check for one hundred sixty dollars, forty cents per sapling. She loaded all four hundred into the bed of a 1974 Ford F-250 and drove them sixty-three miles back to her ranch outside of Nixon. And within forty-eight hours, Gonzales County had a new story to tell. Margaret Holloway bought four hundred Argentine shade trees to plant in her cow pasture.
Understand what the saplings looked like in March of 1982. They were thin. Thin like a pencil. Some of them thinner than that. Most of them were eighteen inches tall. A few pushing twenty-four. They had four or five leaves each. Sickle-shaped and silver green. And the leaves smelled sharp when you crushed them between your fingers. Menthol. Cough drops. Nothing youโd associate with a ranch pasture in South Texas.
The root balls were the size of a manโs fist. The stems were pale and flexible and would bend ninety degrees without snapping. A few of them had a small aphid problem. Tiny black dots clustered on the undersides of the newest leaves. Three of the pots had a spider that had built a web between the sapling and the rim. They did not look like trees. They looked like something a gardener might plant in a flower bed next to a porch.