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Excerpts from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter
from the March 4, 2018 Newsletter issued from Rancho Regenesis in the woods ±4kms west of Ek Balam Ruins; elevation ~40m (~130 ft), N20.876°, W88.170°; north-central Yucatán, MÉXICO
PRINCEWOOD #2 FLOWERING
A tall, well formed, commonly occurring tree has been flowering in our area, sometimes so heavily laden with dense clusters of ½-inch broad flowers that the trees looked like big snowballs. The snowball effect lasts only briefly, though, because upon pollination -- and pollinators crave this tree -- the flowers' corollas quickly turn brown and papery, and fall off, leaving the ovary on the tree to mature into a fruit. Below, you can see a heavily flowering branch bearing both white and brown flower clusters:
A shot of a brown cluster right next to a white cluster is shown below:
In these images you can see that most of the tree's leaves have fallen, to cut down on water evaporation. However, other trees, especially those too young to flower, often retain their leaves. Some leaves have been on their tree for so long that crustose lichens splotch their blades, as shown below:
Up close, the most striking unusual feature about the flowers' anatomy is their slender, yellow-green styles tipped with four spherical stigmas, as seen below:
The flowers' calyxes are deeply cylindrical, with sepals that turn brown like the corollas, as seen below:
To help with the identification, a blossom cut down the middle shows the spherical, superior ovary at the corolla's bottom, seen below:
Finally, the tree's bark is shown below:
You'd think that such a handsome, commonly occurring tree with so many distinctive features would be easy to identify, but there are challenges. For instance, along the Gulf coast up at Río Lagartos, we've seen a tree that, at least at first glance, looks identical to our present tree. We identified that tree as Princewood, Cordia gerascanthus, and its page is at www.backyardnature.net/mexnat/cordia.htm
Can you spot any difference between the two trees? The Princewood tree was documented in our March 22, 2015 Newsletter, and this is our March 25th one, so Princewood and our current trees flower at the same time. But, on the Princewood page, notice in the flower close-up that the stigmas are long and slender, not spherical as in the present case.
On the Internet I find Cordia trees with flowers presenting spherical stigmas like our current ones under the name of CORDIA ALLIODORA. The Flora de la Península de Yucatán page, the main authority on the Yucatan's flora, lists both Cordia gerascanthus and Cordia alliodora for our area. But, here's the sticker: I further find technical literature mentioning the fact that Cordia alliodora can have stigmas of two different shapes, though they're not illustrated.
So, apparently now either we have seen both stigma forms of Cordia alliodora, or else two exceedingly similar looking Cordia species.
This is a good example of some of the taxonomic problems that still remain to be solved. Maybe eventually an expert will write, saying how it's all shaken out. Meanwhile, we can call both species Princewood, and no one with argue with us.
from the December 21, 2018 Newsletter issued from Rancho Regenesis in the woods ±4kms west of Ek Balam Ruins; elevation ~40m (~130 ft), N20.876°, W88.170°; north-central Yucatán, MÉXICO
JUAN'S AX HANDLE
One morning this week I found Juan, one of the rancho's workers, using his machete to fashion an ax handle from a slender section of tree trunk. Below, you can see the operation :
The wood was exceptionally heavy and compact, and its grain was straight. When I asked Juan what tree he'd cut for the handle, he gave the Maya name of Bojum (bo-HOOM). Since I didn't know what a Bojum was, he took me to a medium-sized tree passed each time I go to the garden. It was the same tree we've featured flowering above.
There our pictures show the tree handsomely laden with flowers last March. But now in December all that remains of that flowering are some brown, withered, finger-long, dried-up raceme stems with old flower pedicels, as shown below:
Last March the flowers so dazzled me that I hardly noticed the tree's leaves. Now I noticed that the leaves exhibited interesting features. For example, their blades tended to be spotted with lichen patches, and the older ones curled. Also, their petioles were exceptionally long, as you can see below:
The leaves' bases were consistently asymmetrical -- attaching to the petiole at different places, as seen below:
The long petioles themselves were unusual in that they took on the color and corky texture of the surface of the twigs they were attached to, as shown below:
The leaves' blades were thick and leathery, with the veins not showing very well, but if held against the Sun the venation showed itself to be of that kind whose secondary veins curve forward to connect to the secondary veins above it, as illustrated below:
I had wondered why this species was called Princewood, and now Juan with his ax handle -- which turned out to be a fine one -- has shown me. The tree simply produces wonderfully strong, regularly formed wood.
Those who know Temperate Zone plants might find it surprising that this imposing tree belongs to the Borage Family, the Boraginaceae, for up north the best-known species in that mostly herbaceous family are such wildflowers and herbs as bluebells, forget-me-nots, gromwell, comfrey, heliotrope and hounds-tongue. In the tropics, plants often behave very differently from their temperate-zone relatives.