While photographing in a field near Rio de los Esclavos, Departamento de Santa Rosa, a local person came up to introduce himself. Turned out he was a Mam speaker who had several years experience living and working in USA. But it also turned out that he knew medicinal plants of many areas of Guatemala. So we recently did a field trip in the fincas of the family who owns the building which we rent for our offices.
It is always a good idea to know the owner of the land where you are doing plant photography, and to get to know the local people from nearby villages.
We are now posting a bibliography on medicinal plants to document our continued research. Since we have found many plants which are not in other textbooks, we are seeking grants and funding to continue our long range program to find, photograph, and publish all the local, native Mayan medicinal plants of Guatemala.
Agronomists have surely been using drones for several years. But this technology is still relatively new in Mesoamerica. We recently hired an experienced drone pilot in Guatemala, Juan Carlos Fernandez, to study trees. As long as your drone is not commercial size, and as long as you use it in an area where you are not intruding on anyone's privacy, use is considered normal.
We have been studying ceiba trees for many decades. The Ceiba pentandra is the national tree of Guatemala today and was a sacred tree for the Maya and most cultures of Mesoamerica for thousands of years.
These trees are so high that there is no way to do photography from above unless you have enough $$ to charter a helicopter. Since that is too expensive for most scholars, we are testing normal-sized drones (about 40 cm in diameter).
We learned a lot in the two days of our first experiences. Juan Carlos Fernandez, the drone controller, photographed two ceibas and two palo blanco trees, Tabebuia donnell-smithii. We will be publishing our results in a FLAAR Report and potentially elsewhere in the coming months.
We have found a third species of cacao in Guatemala, Theobroma angustifolium. Took several weeks and several field trips to locate this. Theobroma angustifolium is known as cacao Silvestre, cacao de mico, cacao de mono, and other words (depending on which country in Mesoamerica you ask).
Almost every botanical monograph says that Theobroma angustifolium is from Costa Rica and that in Guatemala it grows only in plantations (meaning it does not grow in the wild and is not native).
We now estimate that 90% of any Theobroma angustifolium in Guatemala seen or heard about by Standley, Steyermark, Record, Williams, or botanists of the Field Museum of Natural History between 1920 and 1980 is now gone. Local people chop down the trees because they do not produce as much as modern varieties of Theobroma cacao. Theobroma angustifolium puts out thousands of beautiful flowers but few fruits.
When we asked all our cacao contacts in cacao growing regions of Guatemala, only one felt he could find some.. After several weeks (and driving about 2000 km back and forth, back and forth) we finally found one tree. The tree was very old, even older than most pataxte trees (Theobroma bicolor).
We at FLAAR institute are studying tobacco of the Maya and Aztec. As part of our project we are raising tobacco plants (not to smoke ourselves but to appreciate the natural beauty of their flowers).
Tobacco and the various other leaves used by the Maya of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, Mexico, and El Salvador are a traditional indigenous cultural feature of importance in their medicine and religion.
Tobacco red night black background Westcott photo by Sofia Monzon.
Plus most of the ingredients of Maya and Aztec snuff and cigars have gorgeous flowers. Although I do not smoke myself already at age 19 I had discovered a Maya vase showing a person smoking a cigar (a 9th century vase in the Tomb of the Jade Jaguar which I discovered while a student at Harvard doing archaeological work for the University of Pennsylvania Museum at Tikal, El Peten, Guatemala).
Plus while doing research in the archives of Sevilla, Spain and Guatemala CIty, on the Spanish documents describing the Cholti Lacandon Maya cigars I learned more about this venerable tradition.
In other words, it is important to understand the natural beauty associated with tobacco and its several thousand years association with the advanced cultures of prehispanic Mesoamerica.
A lot of botanical research tends to be done in the "Maya area" of Peten. Yet over the last year we have found that Izabal, and adjacent Alta Verapaz, offer considerable diversity of eco-systems to allow finding lots of the utilitarian plants which we seek.
Bixa orellana, the seed of this plant is used in our day to flavor foods, the Mayans used to make chocolate as a flavoring too, photographed by Nicholas Hellmuth.
Our goal is to locate, and photograph (when flowering or fruiting) as many of the plants in our list of utilitarian plants of the Mayan people.
We will be spending the coming week in Izabal, starting with the Frutas del Mundo facilities about 20 minutes before Rio Dulce. Dwight Carter has developed a great place to do botanical research here.
Christmas week is a great time to study plants in the area around Lake Atitlan. Our focus is edible plants and plants which produce dye for cotton.
We are photographing cotton: they are a tree here. Not a mere bush. Found beautiful examples of sacatinta plant (produces blue dye, like indigo). But the flower is a gorgeous orange.
Nicotiana is the plant of tobaco, but in the Association of Women in botanical colors we learned that they used as colorants for their threads, photograph by Nicholas Hellmuth.
Found Canec flowering and tree tomato at altitudes much higher than Lake Atitlan. Tree tomato looks like a granadilla but is a tomato. It is the size of a normal fruit tree.
It helps to document that the Maya eat many more things than maize, beans, squash, and much more than root crops too. Plus, the diet in every eco-system was different, since some plants grow only at high altitudes.
