101 YUCATAN TREES INDEX

KIK-CHÉ

Occasionally throughout the year a common small tree calls attention to itself not because its flowers are so pretty but because its massive, brown fruiting clusters are so messy looking, as shown below.

KIK-CHÉ

There's no good English name for this tree. The Maya call it Kik-ché. It's Apoplanesia paniculata, and it's yet another member of the Bean Family.

If you look closely at the brown masses of fruits you'll see that something pretty is going on at a small scale, despite the large-scale messiness, as shown below.

KIK-CHÉ fruit

What you have there is a single oval, olive-brown, one-seeded fruit (a legume with one bean inside it) at the base of which five reddish-brown, veiny, leathery, elongate lobes emerge, like the arms of a star. Each lobe is a much enlarged sepal, or calyx segment. During flowering the sepals look more or less normal, but once pollination occurs and the corolla drops off, the sepals grow like crazy until they form this starry collar below the legume. The lobes help disseminate the legumes by wind. Sepals that expand after flowering are said to be "accrescent."

If you hold a Kik-ché leaf up to the sun you see that tiny, brownish glands are embedded in its leaves, as shown below:

KIK-CHÉ glands

Aromatic oils in those glands must be the source of the fragrant, spicy odor smelled when Kik-ché's leaves are crushed between fingers. In Maya "kik" means "blood" and "ché" means "wood," so this is the "Bloodwood Tree," so named because if you hack the slender, scaly-barked trunk with a machete it exudes reddish sap. In fact, Kik-ché was one of the most important sources of the ancient Mayas' red dyes for mural painting.

101 YUCATAN TREES INDEX