The World´s Tree Species

Madagascar Palm - Pachypodium lamerei

I first encountered the Madagascar palm (which is not really a palm) at the Tirso de Molino botanical garden in Torremolinos, Spain. It is a very striking plant (I´m not sure you can call it a tree??) that looks like the cross between a cactus and a palm. As you can see from the image above it has some down right wicked thorns! One website that sells seeds for this pseudo palm is rarepalmseeds.com . They also have a lot of information about palm trees in general.

The images with the flowers are from a park in Benalmadena (the next town over from Torremolinos). This one was about 6 feet tall while the ones in Torremolinos were about 7-8 feet tall.

The picture below reminds me of an upside down octopus that is grasping a clump of seaweed in each tentacle.

You can kind of see why this plant got named a palm although if you look at it up close it really has very little resemblance to a palm.

Fiddle leaf fig - Ficus lyrata

The Fiddle leaf fig (Ficus lyrata) is a large leafed member of the ficus genus and one that is valued as an ornamental tree for both indoor and outdoor environments. This is not the tree that "edible" figs come from (that would be the Ficus carica) but its fruit does come close in size and resemblance. One difference is the characteristic spotting on the the Fiddle leaf figs.

The leaves of the Fiddle Leaf fig are some of the largest among the fig family (if not the largest, although I´m not sure on this point). The leaves can measure up to 45 cm long and 30 cm wide. The common name in English comes fromt the "Fiddle shape of the leaves - sort of like a pear).

It is very common to find this tree in parks and gardens in Southern Spain. It is also very commonly sold as an interior potted tree. I have seen them in size from 75cm tall up to 3-4 meters tall.

Below is the fruit which is about 4cm long and pretty round in shape. The one on the right is a dried one I found on the ground.

Norfolk Island Pine vs. Cook Pine

This is a series of images comparing the Araucaria heterophylla (Norfolk Island Pine) and the Araucaria columnaris (Cook Pine). I´ve been studying four different species in the Araucaria genus for about three years now. These two in particular are often mistaken one for the other and in fact I did not realize they were two tree species until I started getting a good look at them. The image above is about a half mile from my house on a historic peace of property called the "Finca of San Jose". It used to be a weathly persons large estate with a mansion but now it is an insane asylum. The original family owned a shiping company and had many exotic species of plants brought back which they planted on their estate. The reason the Cook Pine (on the right) is bent is that the top part of the tree died and a new top formed from below the dead portion. Norfolks are a lot less pointy at the top than Cooks.

The bark is one of the key differences in these two trees. The Cook pine has flaky bark that peals off in small rolls. The Norfolk only has a slight amount of flaking on a much smaller scale.

Young Norfolks are much less filled out than Cooks with more distace between the rings of branches. I´ve also notices that the branches of the cooks have more "leaves" then the Norfolks. Also Cooks almost always have a charactaristic lean and their trunk is often slightly bent. Norfolks on the other hand are very straight and upright.

I´ve noticed that the branches of the Cooks slope down and then curl up on the ends. The Norfolk tend to be straight out or sloped slightly up. The branches of the Norfolk also tend to be a lot longer than the Cooks (see the top image).