101 YUCATAN TREES INDEX

SENNAS

All through the year you're likely to see smallish trees along roads ablaze with bright yellow, peso-sized flowers like the one shown below:

SENNA

As shown below, the leaves are pinnately compound and the flowers bear five petals that are more or less the same size, but usually at least one petal is of a different size than the others.

SENNA flowers

Up close, you can see that in the blossom's center there are little frankfurter-shaped things, shown below:

SENNA flower

Those are pollen-filled anthers. The long, slender, green thing arising below the stamens is the pistil, which will mature into the future fruit. Seeing the fruit's shape, you might even guess that eventually the fruit will be a green-bean-type legume, which would make perfect sense, since this tree is a member of the Bean Family, whose fruits are legumes.

The online Flora de la PenĂ­nsula de Yucatan lists 22 Senna species Yucatan Peninsula, and the species can be hard to distinguish, all of them being bushes or small trees with lots of yellow flowers. Senna is the genus name, and in English we call them Sennas, too. Sennas blossom at different times of the year, so you seldom go for long without seeing the roadside adorned with one or the other species. The one in the picture is Senna racemosa, the Limestone Senna. Sometimes Sennas are known as Cassias.

101 YUCATAN TREES INDEX