29. Ebenaceae

There really ought to be a word for these surprise connections that the study of plant families provides us. The Ebenaceae or ebony family provides us with another: ebony and persimmons.

Ebony and persimmons both belong to the genus Diospyros, wherein most members of this mostly tropical family are found. I doubt I ever would have connected them, left to my own devices. Ebony is, of course, the famously dark wood that hails from Asia and Africa and has been used for carving by many cultures, notably the Ancient Egyptians. Ebony wood is so dense that it will sink in water.

There is a wide geographic spread between the various species of ebony: west Africa (Diospyros crassiflora), south India (Diospyros ebenum), the island of Mauritius (Diospyros tesselaria) and Indonesia (Diospyros celebica) -- to name a few.

I had heard of persimmons for many years, but not actually encountered one until living in California, where they are fairly common. What struck me above all about them was this: they have the most distinctive calyx of any plant or tree I have ever seen. The calyx in this case is a hard green "leafy" round base that connects the fruit or flower with the rest of the tree. They are strikingly beautiful and beautifully designed. 

I have tried the fruit of the persimmon, which, like a tomato goes from light green to deep red. I found the flavor to be a bit weird, if you want my offhand honest opinion. To be fair, I think I may have had the heart-shaped, astringent, Hachiya variety as opposed to the squat, non-astringent, Fuyu variety.

Like ebony wood trees, persimmons are widely distributed around the world in many species.

28. Cyperaceae

One thing about the Cyperaceae family is that, if a person were flustered or in a hurry, they might confuse the name with the Cupressaceae family - the same way that a flustered and hurried person might conceivably confuse the Aracaceae family with the Arecaceae family.

Similar sounding as the names may be, in all of these cases the plants could not be more different.

Whereas the Cupressaceae family includes the tallest and largest trees in the world, the Cyperaceae family consists of sedges. Sedges are low-growing plants that typically grow in wetlands. Although there are over five thousand species of these things, I am only aware of encountering a handful of them. They made an impression on me with their completely unusual flowers that don't really resemble flowers at all. Structurally, sedges are distinct.

27. Cupressaceae

 

The more I think about it, Cupressaceae is a family of mind-boggling significance. For one it includes the tallest trees, the coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens), and for another the largest trees, the giant sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum, seen above on a 2007 visit to Sequoia National Park).

 

One would think that that would be enough for one family, and be done with it. But no... There are also to be reckoned with the famous bald cypress trees in the deep south (Taxodium distichum), seen here with their famous "knees" while visiting Louisiana. This is to say nothing of the cypress trees I encountered while visiting my brother in the Texas Hill Country - possibly but not necessarily the same species.

 

But it does not stop at this embarrassment of riches.  There are also the entire worlds of junipers and cypresses and the many images those words conger up. Juniper, a component of gin, is one of the most expressionistic looking of all plants. In Sedona, AZ it is said that their twisted, corkscrew growth patterns reflect the energy of the vortexes. Whether that is true or not, it is hard to argue with the cartoon-Kabuki-Dr. Caligari profile of a Monterey cypress (Cupressus macrocarpa). The better known Mediterranean cypress (Cupressus sempervirens) has a very different effect with its tall, skinny, calming elegence, a familiar archetypal component of Italian landscaping (seen below at the Krishnamurti house in Ojai, CA).

 

And still, the story of the cypress family does not stop here. For that, one needs to dig all the way back to the earliest encounter of all, the rows of arborvitae on my Dad's property in New York. The word "arborvitae" would slip gracefully off his tongue as though it were the most common everyday object. "It's over there by the arborvitae" he would say. For years this Latin phrase, which means "tree of life", intrigued me. I later assumed it must be the genus name, an understandable conjecture, but in fact the genus name in this case is Thuja.

26. Cucurbitaceae

This is an important family from the point of view of food, as it includes the entire universe of squash, melons, zucchini, pumpkins and, as the name suggests, cucumbers. My childhood diet was full of this stuff, from hot summer watermelons to zucchini bread that my Mom made from the overabundance of zucchini growing in the vegetable garden. 

An unusual twist on this familiar category of food emerged in my California years. It was in the chapparal of the Pinnacles that I first encountered the spiky, pendulous green fruits of wild cucumber (Marah fabaceus), also known as Marah or manroot. Another striking thing about them were their long tendrils that would attach and coil around just about anything, thus suspending the spiky fruits at various heights. Pretty soon I was noticing wild cucumbers growing in back yards in King City and brushy thickets all over the Central Coast. Apparently they were used as food and medicine by various Native Americans.

Separately and simultaneously, I encountered fruits that resembled wild cucumber without the spikes. A Mexican colleague explained to me that they were chayote (Sechium edule), a popular staple in Mexico, which explained why I found them in gardens and supermarkets throughout the Salinas Valley. An added surprise was learning about mirlitons, the Creole-Caribbean form of the exact same food, appearing in places like Haiti and Louisiana. The ultimate fulfillment of this journey was to eat the thing. Above, stuffed mirlitons in a preliminary stage of preparation.

25. Cornaceae

 

Growing up, there was a dogwood tree (probably Cornus florida, flowering dogwood) directly behind my parents' house. It was a good size for easy kid climbing - not big, but user-friendly. It was perhaps one of the top ten trees that I was most intimately familiar with, physically, from the simple act of climbing and spending time around it. If, say, as a ten-year-old I had to tie my identity to a particular tree, it may well have been this one - a deciduous, temperate North American tree, loved equally by squirls and ten-year-old boys.

Many years later, while staying on Shelter Island, my mother pointed out a Kousa dogwood (Cornus kousa), a very attractive tree covered with creamy white flowers. It is the stylized, Japanese version of the plain vanilla dogwood that I grew up with. It is more of an aesthetic experience than a physical one. Interestingly, these two dogwoods, kousa and florida, in addition to being around the same size, are closely related.

So there you have it - one lifetime, two dogwoods.

24. Clusiaceae

When I worked at Flamingo Lodge in Everglades National Park, many years ago,  there was a very interesting tree in front of the lodge that visitors would inquire about. It was Clusia major (formerly Clusia rosea), also going by such unusual names as autograph tree, pitch-apple and Scotch attorney. Autograph tree makes the most sense, since it is possible to "write" on the leaves with any pointed object. At the time, and up to this very day, I find this tree to be fabulously exotic. It is actually native to the Caribbean, making it both tropical and local, a great combination as far as I'm concerned. The leaves are firm and waxy, like a Ficus, whereas the nuts and beautiful white flowers are quite unique.

The only other member of the Clusiaceae family that has crossed my radar is Garcinia gummi-gutta, also known as garcinia cambogia, another tropical oddity that has recently been popularized as an herbal supplement. The claim is that it promotes weight loss. Whether that is true or not, what we do know for certain is that it hails from Indonesia and used in Southeast Asian cooking for making curries, among other things.

This is a relatively small family, around 1600 species that are mostly found in the tropics.

23. Celastraceae

At the beginning of this blog, I alluded to a feeling of surprised wonder at learning that two or more plants that you would never connect are actually relatives. The example I used was the Celastraceae family, which contains several wildly different species that I encountered in different ways at different times and in different places.

The first is the shrub Euonymus alatus,  familiar to me as winged euonymous, seen above in all of its "winged" glory. The plants grew all over my Dad's property and their sheer distinctiveness left a very deep impression on me as a child. You could even say that being next to one of these plants was a feeling I developed in the formative days of my youth, much of which was spent outdoors.

Flash forward about three decades to the California Central Coast, where I encountered a street tree that at first I confused with the California pepper tree (Schinus molle). It had a similar shaggy, poodle dog look, but close inspection revealed it to be the mayten tree (Maytenus boaria) from South America. The effect is similar to a weeping willow, as these specimens along Lake El Estero in Monterey illustrate.

A third member of the Celastraceae is a not a plant I have seen in person, but know of through people and films. About a decade before the mayten tree, an Ethiopian I met while working in a mail room in Oregon told me about Khat (Catha edulis), a plant that his compatriots like to chew for its pleasant effects. In his words, the drug makes people feel relaxed and outgoing. Then last year I saw the film Captain Phillips, wherein the Somali pirates are shown chomping the stuff non-stop, and it appeared to be more of a stimulant. In any case, this all seemed as far removed from the euonymus shrubs of my youth as possible, and yet they share a common heritage.

As it turns out, most of this family's 90 plus genera are native to the tropics, with Euonymus and Maytenus being among the few found in more temperate climates. Other exceptions are Canotia and Celastrus. My beloved Euonymus alatus is native to Asia, but has been popular with North American landscapers for some time. As an unintended consequence, it has spread into the wild and been declared an invasive species in some eastern states.