As a student in the 1960’s, most textbooks on the Maya featured maize, beans, and squash in their diet of Mayan foods. Then in 1966 Bronson suggested root crops were crucial to the diet, and several years later Dennis Puleston suggested ramon nuts were equally important.
I have been interested in edible foods of the Mayan people for decades and we now have a list of several hundred edible native food plants of the Mayan people: including edible flowers, edible plant stems, edible leaves, and literally hundreds of edible fruits.
Still, if you enter a Mayan house in a remote area, or if you hike through a milpa in a remote area, what plants to you actually find???
We will continue to work on this project and already have uncovered lots of great information, documented with high resolution photos (we hope you like our photo by Dr Nicholas of the maize, beans and squash that was arranged by Maria Josefina Sequen, one of our helpful Kakchiquel Mayan student interns). She is also an illustrator for www.MayanToons.org.
The bright orange pumpkins popular across USA for family Halloween decoration is a kind of squash.
Several squash were native to the Maya, Teotihuacan and Aztec areas of Mesoamerica (Central Mexico down to Costa Rica). But the pumpkin of today is descended from what grew thousands of years ago across what eventually became the USA.
In Guatemala we study lots of sizes, shapes, and colors of squash which are native to Mexico and Guatemala. But the traditional Halloween squash is the large and orange (and tastes yummy in pie or soup).
Here in Guatemala I love pepitorio, the seeds of one variety of native squash which is grown near Sayaxche, Peten (and other places in Guatemala). Roast & toast on a skillet for a few seconds, and great taste and very healthy also.
We usually don't dress for halloween but this year we decided to use Tim Burton's movies as inspiration for our costumes.
Specimen photographed in Ranchitos del Quetzal, Peten. Photo by Nicholas Hellmuth, Nikon D810 on a Gitzo tripod.
We continue working on improving the lists of Heliconias of Guatemala published by eminent botanists. Not one of these lists is consistent with other lists in other botanical monographs (because the authors were not in each eco-system of Guatemala: we have found two species of wild Heliconia even in the bosque seco parallel to the Rio de los Esclavos).
The Heliconia pictured here is in the impressive garden of Ranchitos del Quetzal, near the Quetzal preserve in Alta Verapaz (directly alongside the main highway towards Coban, CA-14, km 160.5). We photographed this in June and hope to identify its species or variety soon. We also strive to learn whether it is native in nearby areas of Alta Verapaz.
In August Elena Siekavizza was able to identify this as Heliconia adflexa. Then two weeks later Senada Ba spotted the same species up on a hill as we were driving through a remote part of Baja Verapaz. We found out who owned the property and went to ask permission to take photographs; permission was graciously provided.
Heliconia leaves (of other Guatemalan species) are used to wrap tamales. Heliconia leaves of other species are used to thatch Q’eqchi’ Mayan houses in remote areas: we have found two houses thatched with platanillo so far.
It is a challenge to identify atypical heliconia plants since the nice monograph Heliconia an Identification Guide (by Fred Berry and W. John Kress, 1991), is almost three decades out of date. And, as typical of all monographs on Heliconia, is not focused on wild heliconia of Guatemala. Most of the popular books on Heliconia are on garden varieties. Our interest is to encourage growing wild species so their wild DNA can continue.
Our Mayan assistants know plants which are not in textbooks on Mayan agriculture. Our Q’eqchi’ Mayan assistants are writing articles which have information missing from peer-reviewed journals by university professors in USA and Europe.
In remote mountain villages, the kids there are capable of all this, but often the school is a 4-hour hike back-and-forth (not only no school bus, not 4WD pickup available either).
Here is A written with avocados.
Here is Z written with zapotes.
Our goal is to have ABC books and also animated videos (so people can watch them on their mobile phones). We will use local plants to form each letter of all the ABCs.
We have initiated a series of programs to help education of children in remote areas.
In addition to A, B, C…W, X, Y, Z we will also of course spell out entire words.
Once funding is available, we will also indicate which vitamins, minerals, and other healthy proteins are in each natural food.
This way we can help parents (and grandparents) learn about vitamins, minerals, and food values, in addition to learning how to read.
We can also do these educational concepts in the local Mayan languages, such as Q’eqchi’, Pokomchi, Kaqchiquel and of course we would want to do all the languages of Guatemala.
We welcome contacts with companies, foundations, and individuals who would like to help us: FrontDesk “at” FLAAR dot ORG
Driving the back road between Senahu to Tucuru you find lots of orchids. All of Alta Verapaz is moist and most is hills and mountains and rivers. So lots of eco-systems for orchids.
Although we tend to associate orchids with trees, actually there are terrestrial orchids also in Guatemala (precisely along the sides of roads in Alta Verapaz and many areas of the Highlands to the west.
Driving a road (instead of a highway) from Purulha towards Salama (Baja Verapaz) you find lots of orchids in the humid areas (Salama itself is dry, so lots of cacti).
We found orchids in trees, and we thank Alejandro Sagone for knowing their botanical names.
But there were also orchids growing in the ground (there are also terrestrial bromeliads in Guatemala two of which are edible).
Anywhere and everywhere along most highways in Guatemala you can find a rainbow of colors of wild flowers. In Alta Verapaz and Baja Verapaz (if in the cloud forest areas) many of these roadside flowers are ORCHIDS. Yes, WILD orchids by the thousands for kilometer after kilometer.
Many of these roads require 4WD vehicles (and not SUV; they are not high enough to survive the rocks which will shred their axels and anything else low on the chassis).
Lots of birders use digiscopes to photograph birds that even an 800mm camera lens can barely capture. We have experience with 200mm, 300mm, and 400mm lenses, and will be testing a 600mm prime lens in August.
This conference is made to present the importance of nutrition among Guatemalan children, especially in rural areas, and the health benefits that this can have in the Mayan society.
But for photographing plants, not many people suggest a digiscope. But while doing a research project on listing all the heliconia species native to Guatemala, we quickly found out that even a 400mm telephoto lens was not enough.
So we are considering testing and evaluating a SWAROVSKI OPTIK digiscoping system.
