LEAFLESS JACARATIAS

One of the oddest looking trees at the hacienda is a native species found growing here and there in the scrub. The most noticeable thing about it is its trunk -- gray and smooth like elephant hide and so disproportionately large and swollen toward the base that it looks like an elephant's leg. I'm not sure the tree has an English name, but in Maya it's called Ch'iich'puut, and in Latin JACARATIA MEXICANA. It's a member of tropical Papaya Family, the Caricaceae.

Ch'iich'puuts are especially noticeable now because they are completely leafless despite the recent rain, thus highlighting their strange trunks even more. You can see this tree, with newly green Wild Tamarinds, Leucaena glauca, behind it, a Tropical Mockingbird singing among its branches for scale, and the tips of its relatively slender branches burgeoning with clusters of yellow blossoms, at the right.

A second strange feature is the tree's fair-sized fruits, shaped like torpedoes with fins. They'll be along later, during the rainy season.

The ancient Maya found Ch'iich'puut very useful. During their warring with the Spanish conquistadores they kept from starving by eating the tree's somewhat soft bark and the spongy centers of the tree's roots. The tree's fruit also can be eaten raw or made into marmalade or a drink. The smooth bark can be pried off and used as roofing tiles. According to Bishop Landa, who had many Maya killed when they resisted conversion to Christianity, burned all the Maya libraries, and then wrote down what he knew of Maya culture, the Ch'iich'puut's young leaves can be made into a refreshing medicinal drink that cures jaundice, and as a poultice can be applied to the skin to cure boils and abscesses.