Palm Trees in Panama

[It is hard for me to know what to say about news from back home.  Words about that, they seem inadequate.  I have made an extra donation to the Environmental Defense Fund, and am trying to think about the best ways to be a calm, non-anxious, and supportive presence.  I guess that's all I trust myself to say about that situation right now, so instead I'll write about palm trees.]

For this Pennsylvania gal, nothing seems more symbolic of being in the tropics than seeing palm trees all around me. The sheer diversity of the kind of trees that grow here in Panama is truly amazing, but for me, palm trees are the ones most visibly different-from-Pennsylvania trees, and so I spent a lot of time looking at them.

I am so not a biologist, so I don't entirely understand why palm trees are the way they are. Maybe Dr. Seuss would have better explanations and photographs of them, but I'm going to tell you some of the things that I've seen and learned (or mis-learned, maybe) about palm trees since I've gotten here.

1.  They really tall, and 2. they don't have branches the way that normal trees do.  (Of course, by "normal" I mean the kind of trees that I see in Pennsylvania. This is totally a gringo perspective on palm trees.)  

Also, 3. They also surprisingly are often fatter in the middle of the tree than at the bottom or at the top.

I've asked a bunch of Panamanians about this: why are so many palm trees skinny, and then poof out, and then get skinny again?  The responses I've gotten have been 

• "they don't; they're pretty much the same size all the way up" (um, did you look at them?)
• "to hold water", 
• "I don't know" (the most common response), and 
• from an expert birder at the Smithsonian research institute – "in years of extra water and other favorable conditions, they grow wider; in years of drought or unfavorable conditions, that part of the tree is thinner." In other words, it's kind of like the thickness of tree rings in hardwood trees, but instead of growing outward, the trees grow upward.

At the top of palm trees, where the fronds grow, you can often see a very green, smooth portion that seems to be new fronds emerging. Underneath that, the bark often has stripes that look like ace bandages wrapped around the tree instead of around somebody's leg.

Toward the bottom of the tree, the bark often looks spotted and splotchy; that might be moss or fungus growing on the outside of the tree rather than the bark, though.

In this picture below, you can see part of the bark looking splotchy, and above that, the ace bandages wrapped around the tree.

But back to those fronds. The very top frond will sometimes be a light color of green, maybe because they're new leaves? And then the fronds underneath starts turning brown and sagging.

Eventually, these fall to the ground. Raking leaves from an oak tree is a fairly big chore, but at least oak leaves are small. These fronds are huge.

Here you can see a fallen frond on the ground with a kid on a bicycle riding by, for size comparison.

The husks or stalks that come with these fronds are stiff and sometimes boat-like.  One of my friends tells me that she and her friends used to sled down hills in these palm husks when they were kids.  Another of my friends here, Kimberly, tells me that she dislikes palm trees because they don't provide much shade, and when these "pencas" fall off the trees, they can be dangerous to people and to cars below.

And that's the extent of my knowledge about the palm trees that shout "you're in the tropics!!"

In addition to the most immediately obvious palm trees, there are actually lots of different kinds of palm trees here. There's a striking-looking palm tree with red bright red stalks/trunk.  It's not anywhere near as tall as its more famous relative, but it's very pretty.

Here's a close-up of how red these palms are.

There's also a really interesting palm tree that fans out – it looks like a fan, and is completely in a two-dimensional plane.  Maybe it's not even a palm; the leaves/fronds are big and fat like banana leaves.  But I'll call it a palm tree because that makes more sense to me.

The red palm and the fan palm in front of someone's house.

Another view of the house, showing three kinds of palm trees.

Around the corner from my Airbnb, there's another kind of palm tree yet; the bark looks completely like it's woven together from palm stalks, like a basket; it's much stockier the tall palm trees, and the palm fronds up at the top form a canopy that provide a lot of shade. I wonder if my friend Kimberly would like this kind.