BLOOD TREE or
PALO DE SANGRE
The walk to town continues to be a pleasure, especially on cool, sunny days with the
sky so blue. Nowadays the most eye-catching flowering plant is a six-ft-tall, bushy
composite with yellow blossoms whose beauty I've already extolled back in Querétaro where
it also was a robust, pretty roadside weed. There it was called Acahual. It's Tithonia
tubaeformis, and its picture is still at http://www.backyardnature.net/n/06/061211a.jpg.
 The most eye-catching tree is conspicuous because of its sheer abundance in
disturbed, eroded areas, its large, heart-shaped leaves and, most importantly, the
foot-tall, rat-tail-like flower spikes arising from the tips of the trees' upper branches,
as shown at the right.
People here call the tree, which averages 20-30 feet tall, "Palo de Sangre,"
or "Blood Tree." In other parts of the country it's "Sangre de Drago,"
or "Dragon Blood." Any plant bearing such names nearly always exudes red sap or
latex. As soon as I looked closely at the tree I could easily believe it might produce
colored sap because it was clearly a member of the Euphorbia Family, many members of
which, when wounded, "bleed" colored, sometimes skin-irritating, eye-blinding or
poisonous juice. The tree's scientific name is CROTON DRACO.
Of course I wanted to see the "blood." I broke off a leaf and was surprised
to see a clear, mucilaginous sap emerge that didn't redden with time. I nicked a small,
woody branch and the same clear liquid oozed out. An invader I knew was macheteing weeds
on reserve land not far away so I asked him why "Blood Tree" didn't bleed.
"It's full of blood!" he replied, and to emphasize his remark he chopped his
machete into the air the way you'd hack at a tree's trunk, then stood there wide-eyed as
if blood were spurting everywhere. "You want me to show you?" he asked, pointing
his machete at a nearby tree.
 I didn't want the tree to be needlessly hacked so I
declined his offer, but later I found a big tree and nicked a thumbnail-size hole in its
smooth, soft trunk, and out oozed reddish "blood," which you can see at the
left.
Now I know that the red sap emerges only from trunks of larger trees. I've never seen a
tree that restricted its colored sap to its trunk, producing clear sap in younger parts.
My Las Plantas Medicinales de Mexico claims that the tree's bark has
febrifugal properties (lessens fever) and drinking a tea of the cooked bark hardens the
gums. The men renovating the ruined dwelling I'm occupying say that that may be true but
around here if you have gastritis you need to drink about half a cup of the sap, or boil
the bark and drink the tea. |
