A small rock in the Atlantic

We have five different poppies on La Palma.

Papaver rhoeas The red poppy.

The Corn Poppy, Field Poppy, Flanders Poppy, or Red Poppy is easily the commonest. This is the poppy that mostly grows wild in fields.

Eschscholzia Californica , the California Poppy.

The next commonest comes from California, which has a similar climate.

Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy.

And then there's the opium poppies, which are presumably garden escapes.

Argemone mexicana Mexican prickly poppy.
And finally the prickly yellow poppies, which are an invasive species that come from Mexico. These aren't nearly as easy to find.

Labels: argemone, Canaries, Canary Island flora, Canary islands, Eschscholzia Californica, La Palma, Papaver rhoeas, Papaver somniferum, Plants, poppies, poppy

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Wednesday, 14 May 2008

The Palmeran Violet

This is the Palmeran Violet, Viola palmensis. It only grows on La Palma, above 1,900 m. (There's a similar violet on Tenerife, but it has smaller flowers). It used to be rare, but the island government has a program of replanting areas. You can find them beside the road from Santa Cruz to the Roque de los Muchachos well above the tree line.

Labels: Canaries, Canary Island flora, Canary islands, flora, La Palma, Plants, Viola palmensis, violet

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Thursday, 7 February 2008

Dragon trees

The latin name is Dracaena draco Although they grow anything up to 12 metres tall, botanically, dragon trees aren't trees. They don't have annual rings, for one thing. Actually, they're classified in the same order (Asparagales) as garlic and asparagus, although they look nothing like each other. In fact, dragon trees look mostly like broccoli on steroids.

They grow throughout the Canary Islands, and also in Cape Verde, the Azores, Maderia, and western Morocco.

Because they don't have annual rings, it's hard to tell their age. The trunk branches every time they flower, which isn't every year. So you can tell how often a trees has flowered, and make an educated guess at its age that way. The tree in the photo has flowered just twice. The oldest ones seem to be about 650 years old.

The resin is reddish. In ancient roman times, people used to dry it and sell it to alchemists as dragon blood. It must have fetched a packet.

The Canary Islands used to have a large, flightless bird, something like a Dodo. This bird ate dragon tree fruits, so the seeds evolved to have a hard protective covering to survive the bird's digestive tract. Now that the bird is extinct, this covering makes it had for the seed to germinate. The north of La Palma is one of the few places where the trees are reproducing naturally. In other places they put the seeds in an acid bath for a few hours (much like the inside of a bird) to remove the hard coating before planting the seed.

This one lives in Las Tricias, Garafía.

Labels: Canaries, Canary islands, La Palma, Plants