A Neotropical Savanna

On a recent morning walk to a corner of the orchard I had not visited recently, I nearly stumbled over a small white flower.

The morning sunlight shone through the hood, making a glow like candle-light.

Hoping it might be easy to identify, I ran to my borrowed copy of the Flora of Panama Checklist and Index and looked up Arum - the jack-in-the-pulpit genus - and found four species. It did not take long to discover that this plant was none of the four species listed. So, being impatient and eager to get on with the ID, I turned to friend Carla, who did a little research and then turned to her friend Marianne, and behold we had a name - Xanthosoma mexicanum, previously known as Xanthosoma pilosa.

Sometimes (maybe I should say often) plant identification is just a matter of knowing who to turn to for help!

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What you see on the left are a stand of what we call soil orchids, some of which have been beaten to the ground by heavy rains, and on the right a stand of robust Curcuma (locally, resurrection plant) leaves. The orchids have been straining toward the light for some time - we had no idea the Curcuma would cast so much shade when we planted it there - and the rains just helped them plunge on down to the ground.

The orchid stems can grow to 3 meters tall, and the flowers are at the very top, so their gradual leaning over the past week or so gave me the chance to take some images of the lovely flowers.

Panama is home to no doubt hundreds of species of native orchids, and Potrerillos has a particularly fine climate for them, but the first orchid I decide to write about, this one, was introduced from Asia! My excuse is that this orchid is highly conspicuous, being very popular as a cultivated plant. It’s been introduced to Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Panama, according to wikipedia, for this purpose. I had to wonder what the chances were that it would become an invasive plant.

If you don’t live in our neighborhood, and you’ve seen these orchids, you may very well know them as “bamboo orchids.” They are reminiscent of bamboo, with their reedy stems, formation of large clumps, and fairly tall size. Their scientific name is Arundina gramnifolia.

• Arundina comes from the Latin arundo, meaning reed,
• and gramnifolia means grass-like leaves (botanary).

So let’s take a closer look at these reedy stems and grass-like leaves. Read more »

It’s summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and from what I’ve been reading, it’s hotter than usual in many areas. Time to stand in the shade of trees where, I remember reading, the shade may be 15 degrees cooler than the shade of, say, a park pavilion. That cooling may be because of transpiration, the evaporation of water through the leaves, but I have to say there’s something much nicer about cooling off under a tree than cooling off almost anyplace else.

And so, a special appreciation of trees in this 26th edition of the Festival of Trees at Fox Haven Journal. Go there and look, if for no other reason than the pleasing writing and the images of looking up into trees. Check out as many links as you can, as well, for there are some fascinating stories, including one on exploding trees.

Well, Michael stepped in and helped, but no other expert came through with an identification of John’s liana. So with a flurry of emails and image exchanges, we put together an argument that the liana is in the Boraginaceae family.

First, the characteristics listed by Gentry (all illustrations from John’s plant):

- simple, usually alternate leaves

- leaves and stems with stiff hairs

- strongly one-sided coiled inflorescence (flower cluster)

In John’s plant, the inflorescence is coiled when young and then
it straightens out.

- mostly butterfly-pollinated flowers

These four characteristics strongly pointed toward Boraginaceae. To really nail the family, though, we thought we ought to look at the fruits and seeds. Here’s what the seed site has to say about the Boraginaceae:

• the fruit is either four nutlets or a drupe (fleshy with a thin skin, such as a grape, plum or cherry)
• there are four seeds

Here are just a few of John’s fruit and seed images (click on any for a larger version):

No question that these fruits are drupes, and the last image shows the four seeds. (You’ll also notice some discoloration in the last image. John says that these fruits, once cut, discolor very quickly, like apples only even more quickly.)

For those of you who remember Michael’s liana, by the way, his plant seems not to belong to the Borage Family - the leaves are opposite rather than alternate, although the opposite leaf arrangement does rarely occur in the Boraginaceae. I’m hoping that one day he’ll have time to identify it and let us know what he learns.

The Borage Family is an honorable one, with about 2000 species. It includes the famous flower, the Forget-Me-Not, comfrey, and of course, borage, for which the family was named.

So, can we go any further than family with this plant? Maybe.

Seven genera of the family Boraginaceae are known for Panama (Miller, 1988) - three genera of trees or shrubs, and four genera of herbs, lianas, vines, or clambering shrubs.

Of the four genera we’re interested in,

• if the flower petals are white, green, or yellow green,
• and the plants are woody
• while the fruits are fleshy

the plant belongs to the Tournefortia genus (Miller, 1988). With a name like that, and with the coiled inflorescence, at least in the early stages, I was sure the name had something to do with a “strong turning” as in tourniquet! Well, guess what, the genus was named for a person - Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, 18th century French botanist who was professor of botany at the Jardin des Plantes (Dave’s Garden Botanary). Sometimes you just can’t outguess botanical names.

Tournefortia is well distributed throughout Latin America.

Fourteen species of Tournefortia are known for Panama, so it may take some time before we know which species John’s liana belongs to, but it’s pretty satisfying to get this far.

And one of the neatest finds (for me) is this. While searching online for more information about Tournefortia, my eye was caught by a link to Dangling in the Tournefortia I had to follow up, of course, and it turned out to be a well-known book of poetry by Charles Bukowski.

Who can resist a title like that? Maybe read some poetry while nibbling on the fruits. What do you think, John?