Cottonwood Glories

Last time, I had us on the road from Albuquerque to Taos.

It was a lovely drive. Traffic was light. We stopped at Santa Fe and had coffee. (I got some passable, but not great, pictures of what I think was the Our Lady of Guadalupe Cemetery, which is right next to the Dunkin Donut shop in town. It’s quite old, but a bit abandoned, and a little sad. However, I gather there is an effort to restore it.(1)

Then we were on our way again. As we drove, the route became increasingly beautiful. We began to see more trees--beyond Santa Fe the terrain is no longer just sage and prairie, what’s called here “the Mesa”-- and those trees were increasingly gold.

About the photos: First, here’s a shot of the Our Lady of Guadalupe Cemetery. I do hope they fix it up. Second, some of the foliage we saw along the way. this is on the road near Chimayo. This is Cottonwood in Fall. Third, and finally, here’s Martha with wings in Old Town, Albuquerque.

As I said before, that was a big part of why Martha wanted to travel on her birthday. Texas is fine and all that, but in our part of it, there is very little seasonal foliage.(But see note 2, below.) Trees are either green year-round (semi-tropical, you see) or they are Cedar Elms, which is what I think we have in our own backyard.

Cedar Elms are tall, strong, attractive trees, but they don’t go in for showiness. There is no magical change of Fall colors for them. Their leaves go from green to a kind of brown-yellow-gray, which drop off in a more or less constant rain of little, teeny leaves, from late summer through early winter. (It is now December 2025 as I write this, and the trees are finally bare. But it took them months to get there. And the leaves themselves? They drift everywhere. They come into the house on your feet or in clothes. We find them in the living room, in the kitchen, in the bathrooms...hell! We’ve even found them in our dang bed, and we certainly didn’t invite ‘em.)

So Martha, who is a New England girl, misses Autumn. She misses the trees and forests of New England, in all their deciduous grandeur. Which is why we decided to be somewhere else in October, and that somewhere was New Mexico.

The Land of Enchantment, my boyhood home, does have some rather spectacular foliage. That’s mostly due to the Rio Grande cottonwood, a.k.a., the Populus deltoides wislizeni.(3) This is a tall, prolific, fast-growing tree that thrives along New Mexico’s river beds. Essentially, it is wherever the Rio Grande goes.

In some ways, it is *the* tree of New Mexico, and plays an important part in its history. The wood lends itself to furniture (it is a hardwood, but a soft hardwood and easily worked). The outer bark is edible by animals and, in moments of crisis, by people. The inner bark is a source of Vitamin C and I’ve been told that when boiled as tea, it has medicinal value.

But for my story today, it is their leaves that are important. When Fall comes, they go golden. I don’t mean just yellow. Not even bright yellow. I mean full-on gold. I mean Rich as Croesus Gold. I mean, shining, beautiful, stunning, bright gold. (4)

And the leaves themselves can be huge -- 2 to 4 inches long and wide, depending on how much water is available. Thus, in autumn, you’re talking about a tree in which hundreds of leaves are present, each bright gold, and each nearly as big as your hand.

It is rather breathtaking, really.

It was those trees, and the forests made up of them, that we had come to see. We would not have the reds and oranges of New England, but we *would* have fields of gold.

That was, we knew, more than enough.

And as we finally passed the city limits marker of Taos...

We had them a’plenty.

More to come.

Footnotes:

1. See Ana Pacheco, “Santa Fe’s Forgotten Cemeteries,” History in Santa Fe, April 27, 2021, https://historyinsantafe.com/santa-fes-forgotten-cemeteries/, and “Our Lady of Guadalupe Cemetery History Project,” https://www.guadalupehistorysantafe.com/

2. Just to make a liar out of me, this year Central Texas surprised us by having some rather dramatic foliage in some places. Just down the street from us, for instance, there’s a gorgeous tree -- I believe it may be a Chinese pistache--which went all red this year. I’m not sure why things are different this Fall. It may be because we had a wet summer and a very cool Autumn.

3. For more on the Rio Grande Cottonwood, see “Rio Grande Cottonwood,” Tree New Mexico, https://treenm.org/2022/07/27/rio-grande-cottonwood/.

4. Kate Nelson, “Cottonwood Heaven,” New Mexico Magazine (blog), September 15, 2021, https://www.newmexicomagazine.org/blog/post/new-mexico-fall-foliage-cottonwood-heaven/

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Copyright©2026 Michael Jay Tucker

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