Downed Miconia
It may not look like much to one who doesn’t live here, but I was really, really sorry to see this small Miconia tree downed this afternoon (click for a larger version).
We’ve been through four days so far of high winds, and they haven’t stopped yet, although they lessened for a few hours this morning. Today for the first time we started seeing small trees felled. They are mostly this Miconia rubiginosa, called canillo, and a tree in the Aster family called palo blanco. Both are fairly brittle, and palo blanco branches break off the tree at the slightest excuse. But the Miconia rubininosa is one of my favorite savanna trees – partly because they make nice groves in our area, partly because they are so pretty when they bloom, and partly because it was one of the first trees that I sought professional botanical help to identify.
The winds were caused by a plunge of the North American Jet Stream down into the Caribbean, wreaking all sorts of havoc for us in Central America, and worse for our Caribbean friends. If you really have nothing better to do for the next few minutes, you can watch the wind play with our blurry nance trees topped by cecropia trees and our sigua tree (which is about to bloom). The fenced area is the dog run, the yellow building is the bodega (storage shed), and the clothes lines are the clothes lines. The brown grass shows you just how dry this dry season is.
P.S. Berry Go Round # 13, a carnival of blogs about plants, is up, with some seriously interesting posts.
Yikes!
[...] winds earlier this month caused more damage than a downed Miconia tree, and the damage was more extensive than I realized until I compared the most severely [...]