New Sweet Salone post: A bit of botany
Meryl Olson
For those who aren’t aware, the tropics are about a bizillion times more biodiverse (i.e. have way more species of everything) than temperate areas (i.e. New England). Ecologists have spent their entire careers studying why, but I shall not bore you with the details. This makes for some really cool plants and animals. Most of the time this is fascinating. Other times, such as when I’m in my shower at night and surrounded by more species of flying insects than I’ve ever hoped to see, I curse the tropics and excessive, mother-effing biodiversity. The plant biodiversity is less offensive. My favorite tropical plant species, if I had to pick favorites, which I don’t, but I’m going to anyway, are cauliflorous species. I actually just learned this word five minutes ago. Previously I just thought of them as “those weird trees that develop fruits right on their trunks,” since I never actually took botany, though I wish I did. Today I was on a motorbike from Pujehun to Kenema and I saw this bizarre tree. At first I thought it was a breadfruit tree-weird enough in itself-but then I saw that the fruits were smooth, not wrinkled like breadfruit, and growing right out of the trunk. Then, when I got to Bo (the next stop on the way to NJala), I was on the interwebs poking around for nutritional information on some plant species from El Salvador for my dissertation. There was one—Crescentia alata—that I had not been able to find any information on in any of the databases I was looking in. So I turned to ye olde googlemachine. And what should turn up but a photo of that same tree that I saw on the motorbike this morning! Crescentia alata and its close cousin, Crescentia cujete are also called calabash tree, or jicara. They’re native to southern Mexico and Central America but have apparently made their way to West Africa as well (it’s also possible the one I saw was a slightly different but similarly-appearing species). They grow big fruits right out of their trunks (and other limbs) that develop hard shells that eventually turn yellow and drop to the ground. The shells are commonly used as bowls, and the fruit is an effective fever treatment (this statement not evaluated by the FDA, obviously).
I stole this picture of Crescentia cujete off the internet:
Cacao (the primary ingredient in chocolate) is cauliflorous as well. The flowers develop right on the trunk, and then grow roughly palm-sized pods, inside which the cacao beans form. The beans have to be fermented for a few days and then dried for the characteristic “chocolate” flavor to form, without which life would be way less awesome. So yay for cauliflorous trees!
I actually took this photo of cacao:
