My friend took me to CATIE (Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza) in Turri today. We visited the botanical garden and had it all to ourselves! What a great place. I could have easily spent more time there looking a little closer at things so maybe I’ll go back sometime. I’ll just caption these pictures with what I know about them.
Wow, wish I could have been with you. Plants just keep getting stranger there. Great photos, thanks.
So many cool plants I’ve never seen before. Or even heard of! The Columbian Rose is beautiful, Mangosteen intriguing and Cannonball Tree perplexing.
Oops – Colombian…
Aahhh thanks for that correction, I made that mistake when posting but fixed it now!
I’ve never heard of the cannonballs. What are they for? They weigh eight pounds? Very strange.
Yeah, they say not to plant the trees near your house or a sidewalk because when those things drop they sometimes explode with a loud noise! They are grown mostly for ornamental purposes. I want to say I’ve seen the ‘shells’ used in carvings, like to put around a light fixture although I’m not positive that it wasn’t some other kind of gourd used. The fruit can be fed to livestock…people don’t tend to eat it because it has a bad smell. For medicinal purposes it has antibacterial qualities to it, can be rubbed on dogs to cure mange. In humans, different parts of the tree are used to treat stomach aches, tooth aches, pain, malaria, hypertension, skin conditions and wounds.
The flowers smell mostly at night and a tree can have thousands per day on it. They don’t have nectar, but have a lot of pollen, so bees get covered in the stuff when they visit them. They were the coolest things I’ve seen in a while! Very beautiful. There was also a smaller cannonball looking tree near this one. I don’t know if it was in the same family or just an immature tree, but the fruit were much smaller.
Hi the durian is fruit from Asia, in Malaysia is prohibid in hotels, and when eaten, people perspire a strong smell for three days!!!!