The List of Families page allows you to browse through every Family that has been mentioned in this blog, and gives you links to every post that features plants in that family.

This page differs from the Description of Families page, which has been present for some time. The Description page gives overviews of many plant families, with some examples, but no attempt has been made to include a link to every post that mentions that family. The purpose of this page is to give a sense of how a family might be recognized in the field.

The Leaf Arrangement entry consists of a main page and four sub-pages. This entry was designed to help you compare the leaf arrangement of a plant that you have just seen with examples in this blog of plants having the same leaf arrangement. If you are hoping to identify a plant you have seen here in western Panama, using the Leaf Arrangement approach will be the fastest way to discover whether that plant has been described here.

I hope you find these additions to the blog’s structure helpful.

I’m leaning toward creating an online database of the species I’ve identified. So far, I’ve looked closely at doing something with Encyclopedia of Life and at using the database software called Biota. Although Biota is close, neither one fits exactly what I have in mind, so now I’m looking at ways to use spreadsheets in WordPress vs. ways to get the data into MySQL where it can be tapped by a script in HTML.

Details aside, I will continue working on this issue for the next several weeks.

Now that I’ve broken the ice, I’ll provide progress reports along the way.

Thank you for your understanding.

It would have saved a lot of time.

But it wasn’t published until this year. I just got my own copy, and I’m devouring it.

The title is Trees of Panama and Costa Rica (Princeton Field Guides) . The authors – Richard Condit, Rolando Pérez, and Nefertaris Daguerre – know the value of good field guides. Condit grew up in North America and was accustomed to field guides like those developed by Roger Tory Peterson. Pérez and Dagure grew up in Panama without such field guides. They all believe that a series of good field guides will help “budding botanists and ecologists” become familiar with the plants near their homes and in the woods where they walk.

[Right away I knew these were people after my own heart. I still remember identifying, as a youngster, my first bird using a Peterson Guide. It was an Eastern Meadowlark. The satisfaction of matching the bird to the description was inmeasureable, and I still have a warm feeling whenever I see that meadowlark.]

2300 Tree Species

A neat question raised by the authors was: which of the following common trees found in the US and Canada are found in the tropics?

• maple
• beech
• hickory
• fir
• redwood

Answer: none of them. Not found at all in the tropics.

What, then, are the major groups of trees found in the tropics?

Major tropical families are

• mahogany (Meliaceae)
• coffee (Rubiaceae)
• legumes (Fabaceae)

No wonder it’s so hard for a novice to identify trees in Panama without a field guide. The authors point out that we have about 2300 species of trees, compared to about 1000 in all of North America. It can even be hard for botanists:

“We have carried out inventories for 20 years throughout Panama, yet we are still unable to identify every tree we see. In fact, in more remote areas that are difficult to visit, it is typical for tropical botanists to leave as unidentified 25% of the species encountered. There is nowhere in North America where an experienced botanist would have anywhere near this difficulty.” (p. 11)

So, how does one go about learning 2300 trees?

Short answer: most of us don’t. Even if we learned all the trees in this book, we’d then know a mere 493 species. But it would be a long and laborious process to study a tree and then try to eliminate 492 possible identifications. Each time we wanted to learn a tree!

Fortunately, every tree we see has relatives, and if we can learn which Family the tree belongs to, then identification becomes greatly simplified.

429 Species in the Book; 83 Families; 25 Common Families

Trees of Panama and Costa Rica, like many good botany books, groups the 429 species it covers into 83 plant Families. That in itself helps us narrow down the traits that we must look for initially.

The authors introduce us to six leaf characteristics that, together, take us a long way toward recognizing a tree. “Much as a good bird-watcher first checks for the bill size of an unidentified bird, these are the traits you first check when examining an unknown tree…..”

The six features you need to learn for these families are:

1. opposite vs. alternate leaves
2. simple vs. compound leaves
3. toothed or lobed edges to the leaves
4. latex
5. clustered vs. regular spacing of leaves
6. stipules

Each of these features are clearly defined and explained in the introductory portion of the book, so you’ll quickly understand just exactly what to look for.

14 Memorizable Families

A simple table in chapter 2 (which I have copied out onto a spreadsheet of my own and now carry in my pocket) summarizes these traits for 25 of the most common families. You’ll see instantly in the table that only six common families exhibit the combination of opposite and simple leaves! Further, only seven common families have the combination of alternate and compound leaves. And only one common family has the combination of opposite and compound leaves. That’s 14 families with extremely simple combinations of traits, easy to memorize.

So, not only have Condit et al., chosen the tree families we’re most likely to encounter in Panama and Costa Rica, but they’ve pointed the way toward 14 families whose traits are easy to memorize and whose species are easy to learn. What a great way to start learning trees in the tropics – memorize the characteristics of these common families and you’re off!

After the authors have persuaded you that identifying tropical trees may not be so difficult, after all, they let you know how carried away you can become:

“If you spend any time at all trying to identify tropical trees, you will get to know these six major traits and their terminology well, and you will be noting each in every species you see. Soon, you will be counting leaflets and breaking off leaves to look for latex in ornamental plants at shopping malls.” (p. 22)

As may be obvious from the two previous quotes I’ve lifted from the book, the writing is accessible and dotted with surprising humor. I could throw in quite a few more gems, but I’ll end with one from a description of a member of the Achariaceae family (formerly Flacourtiaceae), Lindackeria laurina (carbonero):

“A small or medium-sized tree of forest edge in drier areas. When mature, the trunk has many stilts at the base. Leaves are large and wide, rounded at the base, and bunched toward branch ends. They hang downward at a sharp angel to the long upright petioles. Most distinctive is what happens when a leaf is crumpled: white lines immediately appear at all the folds….” (p. 28)

Doesn’t it just make you want to go out and crumple leaves?

The other books I’ve mentioned from time to time on this blog, especially one by Zuchowski and one by Gentry, are extremely useful and have made the difference between my staying completely ignorant of Panamanian plants and my becoming familiar with and appreciative of many plants in our area. But Trees of Panama and Costa Rica now becomes my first go-to book when I see a tree I don’t know.

Related articles

• A Tree Hugger, With a Twist (nytimes.com)
• Panama’s El Valle de Anton – Where Trees Are Square (odditycentral.com)
• Panama Analysis Institute Dedicated to Earth’s Ecosystem (socyberty.com)

When I looked straight up to see where it came from, all I could see were the leaves and green fruits of a nance tree. I looked down at the ground again, and I found another flower, with an upside-down leaf.

It took awhile before I stepped far enough away from the tree to see what was growing on top of the nance.

A liana, with peltate leaves.

Hard to see, though. Grabbed binoculars, then camera with zoom lens.

Okay. What about on the ground – were there any nearby so I can get a better look?

Well, there were some young plants with peltate leaves under that nance tree. No flowers.

Flowers, peltate leaf, liana. The flower looks so much like an Allamanda that I thought this liana must be in the same family. It seemed at the time that these features might be enough to go on.

Then, it being the rainy season with lots of work needed to keep the jungle from taking over, I let it drop. Until the flowers started appearing again this year, and I decided to get serious about it. Never mind the encroaching jungle.

First I checked with both Gentry and Elpel for a quick list of characteristics that would define the family.

Characteristics of the Family Apocynaceae

• Profuse latex – well, yes. I’m used to white latex in this family, but this time it’s clear, and I couldn’t get a convincing picture of it, but I could see it and feel it. A bit sticky. Moderately thick.
• Opposite, simple leaves, no teeth on the margins.
• 
• Tubular flowers with parts (sepals and petals) in fives. Here are the petals on the left and the best I could do with the sepals on the right.
• 
• Fruit a berry or follicle, often in pairs. The next image is of the follicle, which showed up about four months later. The one outlined against the sky is distinctive, but notice many more to the right. (Botanical asides: Follicle: a dry fruit that is derived from a single carpel and opens on one side only to release its seeds. In the case of this plant, the seeds are wind-borne. Carpel: the female reproductive organ of a flower, consisting of an ovary, a stigma, and usually a style. It may occur singly or as one of a group.)

Okay. I think that’s enough to put it in the Apocynaceae, or Dogbane, Family.

Finding the Genus

Gentry breaks this family down into four main groups: two groups of trees and two of vines or lianas.

The two liana groups are separated depending on whether they have (group 1) small flowers or glands on the midvein, or (group 2) large flowers and no glands on the leaves.

This liana has no glands on its midveins.

Gentry finds three distinctive genera in this group: Allamanda (“Our only climbing apoc with whorled leaves.”), Anechites (“Slender vine with very characteristic hooked hairs on stem and inflorescence causing plant to stick like bedstraw.”), and Peltastes (“Unique in peltate leaf.”

That peltate leaf. Gives the genus, Peltastes, its name.

There are 7 species of the genus in South America, but only one species is found in Central America, Peltastes isthmicus. R. E. Woodson, Jr. named the genus in 1932 and, in an overview of the Family Apocynaceae published in 1936, gave the following description to Peltastes isthmicus:

• Stems ferruginous-lanulose when young [Note the reddish-brown, wooly appearance in the image illustrating opposite leaves.]
• Leaves long-petiolate, broadly ovate, 10-30 cm long, abruptly short-acuminate, broadly rounded at the base, elaborate above, ferruginous-lanulose beneath when young [Long petioles or leaf stems; broad oval shape; dimensions about right; short, sharp tip]
• Calyx lobes oblong-ovate [See the image of sepals, above. A calyx is a collection of sepals. ]
• Corolla glabrous outside, the tube 2.5 cm long, the throat 2 cm long, the lobes 3.5 cm long [Petals smooth outside. Dimensions about right.]
• Follicles 22-25 cm long [Dimensions about right.]

I think that’s it.

From Wikimedia

I’ve always liked peltate leaves, with that leaf stem inserted in the middle, roughly, of the leaf itself. But until I looked into this plant, I never realized where the term “peltate” comes from. It’s from pelta, a small shield used by the  Tracians.

Further, peltastes was a soldier armed with a pelta. (Plural for peltastes is peltastae.)
And there we have that shield, up in the canopy, protecting, it looks like, the inflorescences.

Briefly, How to Recognize

As a member of the Apocynaceae Family, this liana has:

• clear latex
• simple, opposite leaves, with toothless edges
• tubular flowers
• fruit as a paired follicle

The genus, Peltastes, is recognized by its

• peltate leaves

The species, P. isthmiticus, is the only species of the genus in Central America.

Related articles

• A Tree Hugger, With a Twist (nytimes.com)

My Curcumas are light pink in color and have blueish small flowers that bloom from the cone area. The leaves come first and then the flowers. I would love to know what kind they may be if someone knows. I wish I could post a photo too. I love them and was very surprised to see them return the year after we planted them. We live in S. Florida and don’t have to take them out of the ground. I don’t know much about bulbs…but if we move to NC, I would like to take them with me and hope they will grow there too. Sue K.

I wrote back to Sue and offered to post her photos to see whether anyone else who reads this blog might identify them.

Her Curcuma is beautiful!

Click on any of these thumbnails to see a larger version. The first photo includes a bonus dragonfly. Sue noted that the flower in the vase was cut because they had a storm and the stem was bent. The little blue flower opened after she brought the flower inside.

I’m intrigued that the leaves of her Curcuma come up first, then the flowers. The flower stems do seem to come up directly from the ground, though, like our Curcuma here in Panama.

With a little searching on the internet, I think we’ve come up with the name of this Curcuma, but I’d like to ask your opinion. What do you think Sue’s Curcuma is? (If no one knows, I’ll post our guess next week.)

Update: We have one answer so far, posted as a comment to the original post on Curcuma. You can follow the link over there if you want to see it, or you can make your own guess without peeking by leaving a comment below!

Update 2 – The Answer: Sue’s Curcuma is probably Curcuma alismatifolia, as Carla guessed in the one and only attempt that anyone made to answer. It’s a probable, not a definitive ID, because of the number of cultivars and unnamed hybrids in this genus. The story is told well, with another lovely photo, at Botany Photo of a Day, where even the expert called his identification tentative.

The common name of this flower, if C. alismatifolia is indeed what it is, is Siam Tulip. Carla mentioned in an email message to me that a friend had sent her a photo of a whole field of these flowers in bloom, just like a field of tulips. One of the comments at the Botany Photo of a Day site mentioned that this open area habitat is unlike that preferred by many other gingers. I couldn’t say about that, but the mind boggles at the thought of a field of Siam Tulips!

But that tree was something else. Robin Foster of the Chicago Field Museum was very helpful to me in those days, and he remarked that I could easily tell the leaves of the tree from the leaves of the liana because the tree leaves had wavy margins. The leaves of both plants are relatively large, rough, and have pinnate, parallel secondary veins. Both also have beautifully reddish young leaves. After learning about the wavy margins, I easily spotted it:

For handy reference, here are the leaves of Davilla kunthii:

My trouble was, I couldn’t find any mature trees with those wavy-edged leaves. We had plenty of saplings and I saw saplings elsewhere in the area, but not trees.

So I waited….

Finally, this year, one of the sandpaper trees was mature enough to bloom and bear fruit. Gotcha!

This small tree is Curatella americana L. It is in the family Dilleniaceae, which here in the neotropics consists mostly of plants with sandpapery leaves. I have a description of the family in the post on identifying Davilla, so I’ll just summarize the features here.

Plants in the Family Dilleniaceae have (all these images are from the Curatella tree – click on any thumbnail to see a larger image at Flickr):

• a papery fibrous bark

• rough and sandpapery leaves
• straight, parallel, close-together secondary veins

• narrowly winged petiole (leaf stalk)

• flowers with many stamens

With this assurance that we are in the right family, it’s really easy to discover that what we have is Curatella americana, since that is the only tree listed in the Dilleniaceae family in the Trees, Shrubs, and Palms of Panama database. Further, Gentry mentions that it is the only Dilleniaceae tree in northern South America.

Nevertheless, it’s good to know the characteristics of the genus and species. The features (other than wavy leaf margin) that distinguish Curatella americana from any member of the Davilla genus are its flowers and fruits.

The inflorescences appear on the stem, “… in little branches without leaves.” (Carrasquilla) The flowers are cream-colored, 1-1.5 cm in diameter, with 5 petals and many stamens (Zuchowski).

The fruits are 1-1.5 cm across, with two main compartments, each with 2 dark brown to black seeds with thin white aril (Zuchowski).

Its name

Curatella was named by Swedish naturalist Pehr Loefling (1729-1756), one of the 17 “apostles of Linnaeus.”

It is a name from the Greek meaning work or working. Dave’s Botanary says that Amazon natives used the leaves to polish bows and arrows. From the little I’ve read about Loefling, however, his work in tropical America was in Venezuela, not near or on the Amazon. Still, not to quibble. The name is appropriate, since the leaves can be and are still used as sandpaper.

Its habitat

Curatella americana is one of the savanna trees that survives fire well (Kricher), as you may be able to tell from its crooked and twisted appearance. This type of growth is characteristic of such trees. Fires stimulate its seeds to germinate. (Zuchowski)

Its uses

The tannin in its wood is used for curing hides, and the wood itself, which is hard, is used for posts, firewood and charcoal. In Mexico, the edible seeds are toasted and added to chocolate. The buds may be made into a concoction for asthma; bark or leaf concoctions may be used for bathing wounds. (Zuchowski)

In summary

Curatella americana is a member of the Dilleniaceae family, whose rough, sandpapery leaves have pinnate, parallel secondary veins and whose leaf stalk is winged. Young leaves are often strikingly reddish. Flowers in this family have many stamens. The flowers of Curatella americana are white, with 5 petals, and occur in clusters arising from the stem. Its fruits are hairy and reddish, with two main compartments. It is a tree that survives fire well with its twisted shape, and fires actually stimulate its seeds to germinate. It’s well suited for the savanna, and the people who live with this tree have found uses for its buds, fruits, bark, leaves, and wood.

So I was curious. It’s certainly not the Salvia in the mint family that we know from the Northern Hemisphere, but the leaves are a little reminiscent of sage to the touch. What plant is it, then?

After I saw the one that fell, I learned to recognize the mature tree. It has a trunk that reminds me of one of my favorite savanna trees – Miconia rubiginosa.

Having the images here side by side, I see that the trunks aren’t all that similar. The grooves of the “salvia” on the left are lighter in color and straighter than those of the Miconia on the right. Nevertheless, the bark in both cases is deeply grooved and the trunks of the mature trees are roughly similar diameters.

In an abandoned pasture, the “salvia” is likely one of the tallest of the trees there, but if it’s growing along side a quebrada (a spring, sometimes seasonal) it’s just one among other tall ones. When in bloom, it’s possible to see that the flowers are white, but that’s about all you can tell from the ground. The flowers are high up in the crown of the tree, impossible to reach.

I decided my only hope of seeing a flower close-up would be to wait until our sapling matured enough to bloom, with luck while it was still short enough for me to reach the flowers.

This year, 21 months after the first picture of the sapling was taken, it looked like this, and the top is out of sight – threaded into the nance tree (Byrsonima crassifolia) the sapling is beneath.

Quite a rapid growth, in my opinion, but not rapidly enough to produce flowers. Nice leaves, though, don’t you think?

Fortunately, another young tree nearby did have some flowers:

Enough to confirm my suspicion that this tree belongs to the aster family (Asteraceae).

I admit I groaned a little. The Asteraceae family is huge and its flowers are tiny. The flowers are so special they have their own terminology. The terms I’m about to use were gleaned from a wonderfully helpful page on the Flowers of Asteraceae at PlantzAfrica. What is shown in the image above is a cluster of synflorescences. One of them needs to be broken down a little so you can see what that means.

Here is a single synflorescence on the left. From it I plucked a head, or in Asteraceae terminology, a capitulum, which is next to the ruler. The capitulum is a small inflorescence or flower cluster. In this case, the cluster of flowers consists of two tiny flowers called florets. So a synflorescence is, you might say, an inflorescence of inflorescences. Perhaps a “compound inflorescence” would be a better term.

There’s a great deal more to the terminology, but this is enough to confirm that the plant belongs to the Asteraceae family. If I had to identify this plant based on a dissection of these tiny heads, I’d be in trouble. But I figured I could possibly get around the problem by holding in my head that this plant is a tree.

There aren’t that many trees in the Asteraceae family.

So I took a deep breath and pulled out my copy of Gentry’s field guide and plowed into Asteraceae. He listed 19 genera that contained trees, and I was preparing myself to read up on all 19 when I came across this description for the genus Pollalesta on page 349:

Medium-sized second growth and savanna trees with corymbose panicles. Leaves densely gray-pubescent below.

The accompanying illustration was promising. And yes, this is second growth in these pastures of the savanna.

Botanical side note: [definitions from the New Oxford American Dictionary]

• corymb = a flower cluster whose lower stalks are proportionally longer so that the flowers form a flat or slightly convex head. corymbose = adjective.
• panicle = a loose, branching cluster of flowers, as in oats.
• pubescent = covered with short soft hair; downy

This is what it’s often like for me – look up every third word or so in a description! Some of the terms are beginning to stick, but I despair of ever knowing them all. I do use a reference other than a standard dictionary, though. The book by Harris and Harris gives real botanical definitions and illustrates every term. It’s wonderful, but their definitions are a little too complex for my posts.

Next, I checked the Tree Atlas of Panama, and yes, trees of the genus Pollalesta are found here.

Next reference to check was Flora of Panama: Compositae [Compositae is the former name of the Asteraceae family]. Ah, success! Pollalesta is in Panama and it is represented by only one species: P. discolor. It’s enough to say that the description of the head (capitulum) fits and that there are two tiny flowers (florets) in the capitulum.

So, Pollalesta discolor it is. But wait. What’s this about Piptocoma discolor, the name in the title of this post?

Well, as happens fairly often in the plant identification world, a qualified botanist decided that Pollalesta was not really a separate genus but, on the traditional basis of the characteristics of the plants, should really be lumped together with the genus called Piptocoma. The only species in Costa Rica and Panama affected by this decision was Pollalesta discolor now called Piptocoma discolor. [Pruski] The complete official name now is Piptocoma discolor (Kunth) Pruski.

What is known about this tree, this Piptocoma discolor?
For one thing, it is found in abandoned pastures in Panama and Costa Rica, in dry to moist areas. It flowers in January and April and in November and December; it fruits in June, July, and December. [INBio]

It occurs from Costa Rica south into northwestern South America

In the province of Herrera here in Panama, it has the common name of negro [Spanish for "black"]. I suspect that name comes from the color of the inside of the bark, which is extremely dark. The Miconia rubiginosa tree that I mentioned earlier is known locally as canela negra, also, presumably because of the dark interior of the bark. In Herrera, at least, the Piptocoma is recognized as having some value in the pasture and so is not removed. It is said that its bark, pounded and mixed with water, gives a drink against snake bite. Don’t use that remedy on my say-so, though!

That’s about all I’ve been able to find about it. Not a popular tree, I suppose, except perhaps with our former gardener, Dario, and with me. I probably like it because Dario did, but you must admit the leaves are pretty, the bark is interesting, and it makes a nice tall tree in the pasture. I’ll probably never learn why Dario called it salvia silvestre, though.

The true focus of A Neotropical Savanna is learning how to identify the plants I’m surrounded by. I like having a record of how I arrived at the name, because I can always go back and look it up when I forget, which is becoming more frequent than I’d like these days. Once I have the name, then I can learn more about the plant through all kinds of research, but I do need that name. I’d like to keep that focus on this blog, but I wander off sometimes – into rain reports and plant blog carnivals for instance.

My solution is to move to another blog that I started awhile back but didn’t do much with. It’s called An Accidental Botanist. At that site, I’d like to lighten up a little, keep my posts a little shorter, and generally have a little more fun with it. My first post of this year at that site is about Berry Go Round #31, with a small and inadequate tribute to Laurent Penet for starting it.

I’ll keep A Neotropical Savanna up, and I’ll do a little housekeeping on it. I’ll move the weather and other “off-topic” posts over to Accidental and I may freshen up some of the older posts with better pictures as the opportunity arises. I’ll even keep working on plant identification posts, but I’ll have relieved myself of the pressure to get something up with any regularity.

Life is short enough as it is.

The top graph is of wind direction, with North at both the top and the bottom and South in the center, to accommodate 360 degrees stretched out in a straight line. The bottom graph is rainfall rate in inches per hour. Note the scale – maximum is 5 inches per hour. Most home rain gauges capture up to 5 inches, assuming it will be read once per day.

Boquete is not here where we are, but the personal weather station that recorded these data is located 6 miles due north of us and uphill by 1740 feet (530 m).

The river that flows through Boquete flooded, of course, and a resident of the area has posted photos of the damage at Picasa.

For us, on that day, the intense rains were of much shorter duration and occurred at the time of a secondary peak in the Boquete rain. Note that our scale goes to only 4.5 inches/hour.

This particular episode may have been related to a trough located near the Intertropical Convergenze Zone and possibly also by the activity of Tropical Storm Frank in the Pacific.

Whew.

Update – 6 Sep 2010. Boquete Weather Watchers has published a correction to their 14-inch figure. It turns out their rain gauge was out of calibration. They’ve estimated that they received about 7 inches of rain on the day of August 22. That’s about what we got. Their rainfall graph is still correct for relative rain rate – it’s just that the scale is way off. Lesson learned for rain gauge calibration. We’re working on ours now.

Still, 7 inches is a lot of rain in one day. And the floods did happen.

In July we broke the monthly record for rainfall since Señor Espinosa started keeping track of rain in our area in 1992. The previous record – for September 1999 – was 55.3 inches. This July we exceeded that amount by exactly 4 inches; our total was 59.3 inches.

It rained 29 of the 31 days in July and on one of those days, it rained more than five inches.

Meanwhile, our average temperature has been 71 degrees F.

We have a few more tidbits at our weather archives page.