Richard Moore Outdoor Report: The Man Who Grew a Million Native Plants

RIO GRANDE CITY, Texas (ValleyCentral) — “I think I am who I am because of my upbringing. My upbringing goes back to 1767 with the Spanish land grant, and the land grant where I was born was just right there a hundred yards from here. Diego Garcia that’s my ancestry. In 1767 Diego Garcia was issued a portion. It is still there, the Los Garcia’s ranch and that is where I was born," said naturalist Benito Treviño.

Benito grew up in the ranch country of Starr County, and as a boy, he learned how native plants helped his family survive.

“A great majority of the time we literally survived on the native plants, the ebonies, the mesquite, tuna, and nopalitos," he said.

He learned from his grandparents the secrets of the chaparral, gathering native plants for food and medicinal value such as the nutritious fruit or tuna of the prickly pear cactus that could be crushed in a primitive metate producing a flavorful beverage.

Benito and his family were migrant workers, but despite his humble upbringing, he graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a major in botany and a minor in chemistry.

After working for a decade as far north as Alaska, Benito felt the pull of the Rio Grande and returned to his homeland where in 1986 he and his wife Tony purchased their ranch Las Lomitas.

"The whole ecosystem really, it all had an influence on me as a growing kid," he said.

For more than 30 years Benito has been growing native plants in his nursery, providing a variety of species for revegetation projects for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service and private landowners.

He now has grown more than a million native plants.

“Right now, I think I am at 1,014,000. So now, it is like ok, a million…I have done something for nature and it is very exciting and very rewarding, and I was born to do this," he added.