A Neotropical Savanna

I learned from Niches that the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center announced this week that “El Niño conditions have developed and are likely to continue into 2007.”

I’ve been spending all my spare time since then searching for data to find out how this is going to, or already has, affected us in Panama. For some time now we’ve thought this rainy season is drier than usual, but I want to find out whether that’s really true.

Bear with me. These data are not easy to find!

For anyone who grew up in the northern hemisphere, temperate climate, forested area, this time of year can be nostalgic. If there’s one scene I miss, it’s the colored leaves of autumn. Like most people growing up there, including this writer from Ireland, I believed that “There are no true deciduous trees in the tropics.”

So what’s this, then?

It’s not a dead tree. It’s a tree that has dropped its leaves.

I read here and other places about “tropical deciduous broadleaf forests,” but it’s very general. From the reading I’ve done so far, many tropical trees do drop their leaves in anticipation of the dry season.

The biology of how trees drop their leaves in temperate climates is well studied, but I’m having a hard time finding information on the biology of tropical trees dropping their leaves. If anyone can point me in the right direction, I’d greatly appreciate it.

This plant, often a tree, is very common around here, but I saw its flowers only this week and so started making a serious effort to identify it. The lavender flower glistens with something sticky. When the fruit opens, you see red seed pods. The fruit and seed pods are sticky, too. The way the fruit opens, I would have thought it was going to eject the seeds, but the pods cling to the interior of the fruit. (Click on either image for a larger view.)

As usual, what strikes me as one of the most characteristic features of a plant is not what strikes botanists as important. In this case, it is what I consider the succulent nature of the leaves.

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In one day I read scientific names for plants used on two of my favorite gardening blogs (La Gringa’s Blogicito and Gardener in Chacala, Mexico). La Gringa talked about finding foliage plants – the kind we used to grow as house plants in the US – by the side of the road. She listed the scientific names of three of them. The Mexican gardener talked about learning how the Prickly Pear, Opuntia ficus-indica, can be used as a medicinal plant. (Since then, she’s posted several more scientific names of flowers!)

I was chagrined. Here I am struggling to learn the family name of any particular plant that I collect, and there they were, on that day, spewing out genus and species names. Sigh.

It reminds me of the time several years ago that a friend of mine, a professional botanist, tried to teach me how to recognize members of the rose family (5 petals, 5 sepals is all I remember from that session). But when she showed me another sample of a member of the rose family, I blanked on what I had already learned. What a failure! At that time I could distinguish with ease the microscopic features of marine crustaceans, but put a plant in front of my face and….well.

But I’m gaining courage. A new book arrived in the mail: A Field Guide to the Families and Genera of Woody Plants of Northwest South America (Columbia, Ecuador, Peru) by Alwyn H. Gentry. The author asserts that the families of tropical plants are actually easy to learn. He’s provided keys to identification that look encouragingly straightforward to use. So maybe it will happen.

I’ve been wondering why it is so important to me to get the name of a plant right.

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