Ensete ventricosum - Wild Banana, Ihindu (Kiduyu), Ikulutui (Kamba), Getembe (Maasai)

I took these photos of Ensete ventricosum growing in the understory of secondary forest in Kenya, E. Africa.

BACKGROUND, ORIGIN AND DISTRIBUTION

Ensete ventricosum, commonly known as the Ethiopian banana, Abyssinian banana, false banana, enset or ensete, Like the domesticated banana, Ensete is technically classified as an herb, the largest herbaceous plant the world. E. ventricosum can grow up to 12 m in height. In Kenya the plant is widespread in the highland areas, both cultivated and growing wild. It can be found most commonly in the wild along streams in upland valleys, ravines, and on the lower slopes of mountains, typically between 1,000 – 2,400 m.

USES AND ETHNOBOTANY

The plant has been cultivated in Ethiopia for thousands of years where it is still considered to be one of the most important and widely cultivated root crops. The pseudostems, corms and stems of flowering branches are used to make a starchy product which is fermented in a pit and then made into a kind of pancake, bread, and porridge.

The Ensete pseudostem has medicinal uses, also used for animal fodder, shade, adornment, roof thatch, and dye. The seeds are used as beads for ornamentation.

PROPAGATION AND CULTIVATION

Ensete ventricosum in the wild in Kenya, E. Africa.

Ensete can be propgated from seed and corm division. 

“Enset provides more amount of foodstuff per unit area than most cereals. It is estimated that 40 to 60 ensete plants occupying 250-375 sq. meters can provide enough food for a family of 5 to 6 people.” – Country Information Brief, FAO

Lecythis minor (syn. L. elliptica) - Coco de Mono

This is a fantastic tree with much potential for further dissemination and integration into agroforestry and regenerative agricultural systems.

I first encountered the species growing in a stand of three trees in a somewhat neglected area on the edge of Summit botanic gardens outside of Panama City. I have collected seed from these trees for years. A cream colored aril is attached to the end of each nut, the aril tastes like anise but I’m not entirely sure if its edible. The nut itself is one of the best tasting tropical nuts I have eaten, identical in taste to its close relatives L. zabucajo and Brazil Nut (Bertholletia excelsa).

ORIGIN AND DISTRIBUTION

Ranges from the Maracaibo lowlands of Venezuela to the northern coast of Colombian where it ascends to the Magdalena and Cauca valleys. The species most often occurs in dry, open, somewhat disturbed habitats where it grows as a much branched tree, however it can also be found growing in moister forests, especially along waterways where it reaches heights of 25 m. 

USES AND ETHNOBOTANY

The tree is primarily cultivated from seed for its nut, which can be eaten fresh or roasted. The seedpod and nut are like smaller versions of the closely related L. zabucajo. The nut has a superior flavor and a high oil content. In Brazil, an oil is extracted from the nuts to make soap.

PROPAGATION AND CULTIVATION

The tree is easily propagated from seed, although this species has never been systematically cultivated for commercial purposes. It is an underutilized crop that warrants further experimentation and research for incorporation into tropical agroforestry systems. 

Gustavia superba - Membrillo

ORIGIN AND DISTRIBUTION

Gustavia superba, or Membrillo, is a tree with origins in tropical lowlands from Ecuador to Panama and Venezuela. It is mostly found in homegardens grown for personal consumption. 

USES AND ETHNOBOTANY

The rounded, pear shaped fruits appear on the trunk contains one to four large smooth light brown seeds are surrounded by a fleshy edible orange pulp, which is typically boiled and is said to have a taste resembling meat.Membrillo pulp is rich in vitamins A, B, and C.

PROPAGATION AND CULTIVATION

The tree can be propagated easily from the seeds found embedded in the edible pulp. The tree is generally slow growing, likes water and sun, and can reach a height of five to ten meters. The species is adapted to hot, humid, tropical climates and will do best in well drained soils with full sunlight. The leaves of G. superba are a favorte food of iguana.

Lecythis zabucajo - Monkey Pot

DESCRIPTION, ORIGIN AND DISTRIBITION

Monkey Pot, or Olla del Mono, is a term to describe not only L. zabucajo, but a number of other closely related species, including: Lecythis elliptica, Lecythis grandiflora, and Lecythis pisonis.

All of the Monkey Pot species are native to the humid tropical forests of northern South America, from Colombia to Brazil. They have been introduced on a small scale to a number of countries with similar climates around the world.

The trees are of varying sizes. Lecythis elliptica is smaller with spreading branches, the others can reach heights of over 35 meters, also with a spreading canopy, also about 35 meters, if not more.

There are a few old L. zabucajo trees in a stand where I collected seed, remarkably wide canopy, close to sixty feet I would say. The branches arc up and out until they almost touch the ground. Typically, one can locate an open pod and merely walk around beneath it and find seed. However, the agouti forage for nuts in these trees and will chew through the woody pod to extract them. So I had to climb up the end of a branch and hang precariously  while pulling on a rope tied around a higher branch holding the fruit, then clip the 3/4 inch stem.

The large woody fruit of L. zabucajo.

The photos below are from that stand. The last two photos are from a smaller fruit from a smaller tree, but larger than L. elliptica. I’m not sure if it was just a smaller L. zabucajo tree or another species.

The fruit is a roundish and woody with a cap that pops off when it’s reached maturity. Inside are anywhere from 8 – 40 seeds (depending on the species) which fall from the woody capsule after a period of time.

USES AND ETHNOBOTANY

This species is closely related to the Brazil nut, both belonging to the family Lecythidaceae and having coconut-sized fruits. The tree's large woody gourd-like fruits with edible white flesh are used for water vessels and for ornamental purposes. The fruit is called 'monkey pot', a name used for a number of other species, including Lecythis elliptica, Lecythis grandiflora, and Lecythis pisonis. The name is said to derive from baiting an empty fruit with food and fixing it to a low branch; a monkey can easily insert its paw through the opening, but cannot withdraw it once it has grasped the contents.Although they are little known outside their area of origin, the nuts produced by these species are among the best in the world, equal or superior in flavor to the Brazil Nut. There is a cream colored arial attached to the end of each seed. On numerous occasions I have tried it, it has a sweet licorice-like flavor although I was once told it has psychoactive properties. The tree wood is also of high quality.

PROPAGATION AND CULTIVATION

The Monkey Pot (Lecythis species) require a hot, humid climate. Deep, well drained soils are preferable. The young trees will also benefit from a shady environment in their first few years of growth.

Trees are propagated by seeds, which will germinate in anywhere from 2 weeks to 4 months. In my experience, fresher seed will germinate faster. Initial growth is fast, a young tree can reach a meter in height in its first year. Trees are typically spaced 8 – 10 meters apart in single species plantations or groups. They can also be integrated into mixed species agroforestry systems as a long lived overstory / canopy tree..

Canarium ovatum - Pili nut

Pili nut is one of the best tasting nuts in the world in my opinion. I encountered my first mature tree at Summit botanic garden, boarding Soberania National Park outside Panama City. The tree has strong structure, very attractive, producing an abundance of nuts. The nuts have a very strong shell containing one elongated kernal.

ORIGIN AND DISTRIBUTION

The Pili nut originates in the Philippines and is widely cultivated both there and in neighboring islands. It can be found in cultivation in Indonesia and Malaysia. The Pili nut has also been introduced into the American tropics where it is produced at a commercial level.

USES AND ETHNOBOTANY

The nut is edible raw or cooked and has a flavor comparable to Mediterranean almond. It can be eaten raw or toasted and can be used to extract an edible oil.

PROPAGATION, CULTIVATION AND MANAGEMENT

Pili nut is a species from the humid tropics, and is best planted from sea level up to 500 meters. The tree prefers deep well drained soils.

Pili nut is a fast growing tree, producing nuts year round. An adult tree can produce around 35 kilos of nuts a year.

The pili tree is excellent for landscaping, as a windbreak, and for agroforestation. The young shoot is edible and the resin-rich wood makes excellent firewood. The green pulp can be made into pickle, while the ripe pulp is edible after boil-ing.  It also contains an oil that may be used for lighting, cooking and in the manufacture of soap and other industrial products.  The shell makes an excellent cooking fuel and can be made into attractive ornaments.  The kernel is edible raw, roasted, fried or sugar-coated, and is also used in making cakes, puddings and ice cream.  It is rich in oil, which is suitable for culinary use.

The kernel contains 12-16% protein, 69-77% fats and 3- 4% carbohydrates.  It is also rich in minerals, but poor in vitamins.  The kernel oil has 60% oleic glycerides and 38% palmitic glycerides.

Pilinut pulp is also edible, containing 8% protein, 37% fats, 46% carbohydrates, 3% crude fibre and 9% ash.  The pulp oil contains 57% oleic glycerides, 14% linoleic glycerides and 29% saturated fats.

Plants Are Better at Complex Decision-Making Than We Ever Realized

We know that plants can learn, and make decisions, and we now have a new level of insight into the decision-making process plants go through when put under pressure, vying with competitors for limited access to sunlight.

It turns out that plants can adapt to the size and strength of their nearby neighbors, deciding how best to survive considering what's happening around them, according to a new study. Read the full paper Decision-making in plants under competition at Nature.com.

Abstract

Plants can plastically respond to light competition in three strategies, comprising vertical growth, which promotes competitive dominance; shade tolerance, which maximizes performance under shade; or lateral growth, which offers avoidance of competition. Here, we test the hypothesis that plants can ‘choose’ between these responses, according to their abilities to competitively overcome their neighbors. We study this hypothesis in the clonal plant Potentilla reptans using an experimental setup that simulates both the height and density of neighbors, thus presenting plants with different light-competition scenarios. Potentilla reptans exhibit the highest vertical growth under simulated short-dense neighbors, highest specific leaf area (leaf area/dry mass) under tall-dense neighbors, and tend to increase total stolon length under tall-sparse neighbors. These responses suggest shifts between ‘confrontational’ vertical growth, shade tolerance and lateral-avoidance, respectively, and provide evidence that plants adopt one of several alternative plastic responses in a way that optimally corresponds to prevailing light-competition scenarios.

Source: Nature.com

Mapping the first family tree for tropical forests

More than 100 researchers have collaborated to classify the world's tropical forests according to their evolutionary history, a process that will help researchers predict the resilience or susceptibility of different forests to global environmental changes.

The results, culled from almost 1 million different tree samples from 15,000 tree species, have uncovered a shared ancestry between tropical forests thousands of miles apart and previously believed to be unrelated. Published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study describes an international, grassroots effort to collect and analyze data from more than 400 geographic coordinates across the tropics, a region that comprises 40 percent of the Earth's surface.

The study was led by Ferry Slik, an associate professor at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam in Brunei. Janet Franklin, a distinguished professor of biogeography at the University of California, Riverside, coordinated the interpretation and reporting of the data, which is publicly available as an open access article.

Franklin said the new classification scheme's value comes from the inclusion of ancestral information about the tree samples (gleaned from DNA analyses), rather than the "snapshot" of tree biodiversity that is obtained from recording a plant's species.

"When ecologists study biodiversity, they look at the present day by identifying the range of species in a particular forest. However, without going deeper into a plant's history by looking at its family tree, each species is considered separate and unrelated," Franklin said. "By adding the evolutionary relationships between species, however, we suddenly have a measure of how similar species are to each other. This means that we were able to do a much more detailed and realistic comparison between forest sites than previously possible."

The study revealed five major tropical forest regions: Indo-Pacific, Subtropical, African, American, and Dry Forests, which are found at the boundaries between tropical and dry climates.

The study also showed the evolutionary relationships between the forests. One surprising finding was that tropical forests in Africa and South America are closely related, with most of the differences between them occurring within the last 100 million years.

More information: J. W. Ferry Slik el al., "Phylogenetic classification of the world's tropical forests," PNAS (2018). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1714977115 

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences  

Provided by: University of California - Riverside 

2,000 years ago, people domesticated these plants. Now they’re wild weeds. What happened?

"Adventurers and archaeologists have spent centuries searching for lost cities in the Americas. But over the past decade, they’ve started finding something else: lost farms.

Over 2,000 years ago in North America, indigenous people domesticated plants that are now part of our everyday diets, such as squashes and sunflowers. But they also bred crops that have since returned to the wild. These include erect knotweed (not to be confused with its invasive cousin, Asian knotweed), goosefoot, little barley, marsh elder, and maygrass. We haven’t simply lost a few plant strains: an entire cuisine with its own kinds of flavors and baked goods has simply disappeared.

By studying lost crops, archaeologists learn about everyday life in the ancient Woodland culture of the Americas, including how people ate plants that we call weeds today. But these plants also give us a window on social networks. Scientists can track the spread of cultivated seeds from one tiny settlement to the next in the vast region that would one day be known as the United States. This reveals which groups were connected culturally and how they formed alliances through food and farming."

Read full article at ArsTechnica: Hunting for the ancient lost farms of North America: 

Is Amazonian tree biodiversity / species distribution a product of past landscape domestication?

News of recent studies has revealed that an estimated 390 billion trees are growing in Amazonia today, consisting of an approximate 16,000 species. 227 of these species are termed “hyperdominant”, because they represent about half of the total number of trees, while the rarest 11.000 species make up only 0.12% of the total.

Why only 227 species make up such a disproportional percentage of overall trees remains unknown.

“We knew that, normally, a few species dominate ecosystems, but if you have a system that has 16,000 tree species but just 227 make up half of the trees, that was pretty surprising even for us,” said lead author Dr Hans ter Steege from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands.”

“In the paper, Dr. ter Steege and the team of more than 100 scientists wrote that there was no evidence that two key functional traits for trees – seed mass and wood density – played a part in determining what species dominated the landscape.” Read full article on BBC

Although the long and highly-involved history of human-forest habitation/impact/modification in Amazonia was not mentioned in the article(s), I am curious if the researchers have begun to look into the possible correlation between the 227 hyperdominant species and their ethnobotanical significance among past and present populations of Amazonian indigenous peoples. My guess is that the 227 hyperdominant species also have a wide range of human uses.

With recent findings confirming that sophisticated human societies inhabited the Bolivian Amazon 10,400 years ago, and that human habitation of the region likely dates back as far as 30,000 years, coupled with our firmly established understanding that Amazonian peoples have managed highly complex, large-scale domesticated landscapes (massive agro-silvo-pastoral systems), it seems inevitable that long-term human presence in the Amazon has played significant role in determining present day biodiversity and species distribution.

We’ll see what answers science comes up with.

Here are a few relevant articles on the subject of pre-Colombian Amazonian history, Amazonian agroforestry, and anthropogenic landscapes in the Amazon:

Clark Erickson: Culture amidst the Pristing: The Anthropogenic Forests of the Bolivian Amazon

NPR Article: Amazon was once home to advanced civilizations

Discovery News: Did humans arrive in the Americas 30,000 years ago?

New York Times: Once Hidden by Forest, Carvings in Land Attest to Amazon’s Lost World

Science Daily: Pre-Colombian societies in the Amazon may have been much larger and more advance then thought

Agroforestry and the Built Environment by: Spencer Woodard (Anthropogen):

New Yorker: Under the Jungle by David Grann

PDF: Amazonian Agroforestry and Homegardens

Tropaeolum tuberosum - Mashua

OVERVIEW, ORIGIN, AND DISTRIBUTION

Closely related to the common nasturtium, T. tuberosum is a perennial plant domesticated and traditionally grown in the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes Mountains of South America. The plant is a creeper with fleshy stems and orange-red flowers similar to those of nasturtium. The plant is a creeper with fleshy stems and orange-red flowers.

 It was cultivated centuries before European Colonization for the edible root / tuber. Europeans brought the plant back home where it has since been propagated and selected for its ornamental traits. The tuber nasturtium is practically unknown outside of South America where it is still grown as a staple food in many high altitude areas where few other crops will grow

USES AND ETHNOBOTANY

The edible roots are white with purple spots, not dissimilar to the form of some potatoes. Traditionally the roots are not eaten fresh but are dried and eaten like potatoes. Pickled tubers have been used in Europe to garnish hors d’oeuvres and cold meats. Leaves are added to salads for their spicy taste and attractive colors. Young seeds and unopened flowers are pickled with tarragon and used as a substitute for capers.