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.
Crotalaria longirostrata, Chipilin Flower, photographed by Nicholas Hellmuth. Copyright FLAAR 2012
In addition to studying indigenous tropical fruits, nuts, vegetables, and grains of Mesoamerica, we are also doing research on edible leaves (lots more than just spinach-like options).
Last week we were near Mazatenango to donate a set of photographic enlargements of cacao fruit to the local cacao growers association of San Antonio Suchitepequez. When in this area we always select a hotel which has as large a garden as possible, in the hopes of finding Mesoamerican plants in bloom. There is one hotel which has a small milpa in the back, plus two cashew nut trees.
Every month a completely different plant is in full bloom: six months ago it was the cashew trees. Last week it was the chipilin plant, Crotalaria longirostrata. Although it is the leaves which are eaten, I spent my time focusing on the pretty yellow flowers. Later this week we will add an entire web page and photo essay on chipilin flowers.
High-resolution digital photographs of sacred trees and sacred flowers are now on exhibit at the Missouri Botanical Garden, St Louis, Missouri. These photographs, by Nicholas Hellmuth and Sofia Monzon, show the ceiba tree and flowers of most of the relatives of this sacred tree.
The exhibit continues through to November 18, 2012.
Here are front covers of a whole series of photo-essays on Pachira aquatica. The flower of this or related species is pictured in Classic Maya art of Peten. Research project on all trees of Maya Mesoamerica with conical spines
I have been photographing the spines on the trunks of Ceiba pentandra trees for several decades. I raised Ceiba when I was creating the Yaxha Parque Nacional in Peten. And today I raise Ceiba in the ethnobotanical garden surrounding our office.
But there are many more trees with spines than just Ceiba pentandra. So we have a long-range project to identify and then find and photograph each species. Below is a set of specimens that we located over the Christmas holidays (we work all holidays, as they are a convenient time to get out of the office and into the rain forests and fields).
Spices, flavoring, condiments, herbs to flavor cacao. Then we will have a series of publications on spices used by the Maya (and Aztec) to flavor cacao. It turns out that in the time before the arrival of the Spanish that cacao was primarily a vehicle for adding a diverse slew of tasty flowers and other plant chemicals to your body.
I drink dark chocolate every day so I can stay alert in the mid-afternoon (when I should be taking a siesta). But it is straight dark chocolate: I add only milk and brown sugar (real brown sugar, not white sugar colored with molasses).
But if I had been an Aztec priest or Maya lord, I would be adding a remarkable range of flowers, herbs, seeds, and other chemically active plant substances. The Aztec or Maya lord would probably select whether he wanted simply to get high, or have visions, or jump into the hammock with a dozen ladies-in-waiting.
Sophie and Michael Coe, and several other knowledgeable scholars, have written on the various flavorings for cacao. But almost never are the plants and flowers shown in detail.
When I was corresponding with Professor Coe a few years ago, he encouraged me to look deeper into the flavorings for cacao, so I have been working on this.
I now have an ample list of cacao flavorings (significantly longer than lists in most books on cacao of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica). Now our goal is to identify each plant and see where we can find each plant, flower, or spice in Guatemala. And go photograph it at high resolution.
We will start publishing our preliminary results as soon as funding is available.
