The Tree That Barely Blooms

If you drove past a mesquite you would not stop. It is low, thorny, grey-barked, and for most of the year it looks like something that survived rather than something that grows.

That is more or less the truth of it. The mesquite puts its roots down further than almost anything else in the landscape — far enough to find water that other trees have given up on — and it spends its energy staying alive rather than looking like much.

The flowering is the exception

Then, in some years, it blooms. Pale yellow catkins, nothing dramatic, and they do not last. The window is short and it depends entirely on rain that may or may not have arrived months earlier. A dry spring and the tree simply does not bother.

The beekeepers know this before anyone else. They watch the sky in a way that has nothing to do with weather apps and everything to do with having done it for thirty years.

What the bees bring back

When the bloom holds, the hives are moved to sit under it, and for those weeks the bees work almost nothing else. That is what makes the honey monofloral: not a process, an absence of alternatives.

The result is pale. Paler than people expect — closer to white wine than to the amber colour honey is supposed to be. It tastes of caramel first, then something green and slightly resinous underneath, and it does not taste like the honey in the supermarket because it is not the same substance doing the same job.

Why we did not smooth this out

We could have blended it. Mixed a mesquite year with a mesquite year and produced something consistent, always available, reliably the same.

We decided the inconsistency was the point. The honey in Enredadera is one bloom, raw, unblended, and there is a number on the base saying how much of it there was.

A tree that almost does not flower is a strange thing to build a company on. It is also the only reason any of this is worth giving.