More interesting plant material is up at Berry Go Round #3, posted at Greg Laden’s Blog. There’s something for everyone interested in plants – artichokes, borage, liverwort sex (the movie!), and tropical forests, wet and dry. And more.
What feature brings a plant – whether a tree, shrub, vine, or garden variety – to your attention?
For me, it’s often the flower. I’ll be aware of a plant in the background, but when it blooms, then I really pay attention.
For the Cojoba tree, though, it was the leaves that made me stop and look. Toward the end of February, while the leaves of all the trees on the west side of our orchard wall were in various shades of green, the leaves of one kind of tree suddenly had a soft, rufous look.
The leaves themselves were attractively arranged, swooping down like giant bird feathers. The foliage made a nice contrast to the other trees, and I decided to watch for any sign of flowering to help me learn more about the tree. I thought I could guess already what family it belonged to, though. Those bird feather leaves were the biggest clue.
Sometimes I think I should name this blog The Accidental Botanist. So many of my serious efforts at identification have ended up erroneous whereas I often stumble across an identification that just “clicks” with something I’ve seen recently. So it was with the nance macho, the common name in Spanish. [Nance is pronounced NAN'-say.]
I’ll get back to that name later, but one day I noticed a tree in bloom near the seasonal stream bed (dry now) that we cross whenever we leave our property. I took a few photos and thought that someday I’d sit down and try to figure out what it was.
Within a couple of days I was thumbing through Trees and Shrubs of Panama and saw a picture of a tree in bloom that almost exactly matched mine. (The tree below was one I spotted later on the road to Potrerillos, not the one by the stream bed. This image gives you a much better idea of the whole tree than did the stream bed photo.)
Since it seemed almost too good to be true that I would have my ID so quickly, I thought I’d better check the Trees, Shrubs, and Palms of Panama web site to see whether there might be other plants in the same genus or family that might cause me to confuse my plant with that in the book. Read more »
