| from the October 10, 2010 Newsletter issued from
Hacienda Chichen Resort beside Chichén Itzá Ruins, central Yucatán, MÉXICO CIP-CHÉ ABLOOM Nowadays here and there at woods edges you see trees maybe 15 feet tall (4.5m) just glowing with smallish yellow flowers. A branch of one is shown above. Closer up you can see the tree's simple, opposite leaves, and flowers with five "clawed" yellow petals below:
A close-up of a single flower is below:
In that picture the five spatula-like petals are easy enough to identify. From the elevated central area arise three slender, greenish styles (ovary necks) bearing stigmatic areas where pollen grains germinate. Clustered around the three styles are the stamens, the flat, paddle-shaped things below the brown anthers being staminodia, or sterile stamens. What's really interesting is the ring of shiny, oval items -- two between each pair of petal claws. Those are glands, a pair of them on each sepal. A view from below a flower showing the gland-pairs obscuring the sepals is shown below:
We've run into oversized sepal glands before, such as on pink Barbados-Cherry flowers, as shown at http://www.backyardnature.net/n/09/091122mr.jpg and yellow Nance, or Golden Spoon, flowers, as seen at http://www.backyardnature.net/n/09/091206ne.jpg. The Barbados-Cherry, the Nance and the roadside tree we're talking about now all bear those large sepal-glands because they're in the same big family, the mostly tropical Malpighia Family, or Malpighiaceae. Members of the family are woody; no tree or bush well known to North Americans or Europeans belongs to that family. Our roadside tree belongs to the genus BUNCHOSIA. Probably it's Bunchosia swartziana, though its leaf bases are more rounded than those shown in the few pictures of the species on the Internet. It might be B. lanceolata, which also occurs here, but which so far doesn't have pictures in cyberspace. Whatever the species' binomial name, the local Maya, who call it Cip-Ché, have a high regard for it because of its miraculous healing powers. When you suffer "evil winds," a shaman with a handful of branches from this handsome tree can brush away your miseries. My shaman friend José explains that it equalizes the energies, also that there are three kinds of Cip-Ché, one with flowers, another with fruits, and another with nothing but leaves. I have found that often the Maya, even those very intimate with their local plants, don't recognize the fundamental relationship between all flowers and fruits. If this is indeed Bunchosia swartziana, the tree is distributed from Mexico to Bolivia. In southeastern Mexico sometimes it's cultivated in home gardens for its fruits. |
