Pochote

Trees in Nicaragua are super cool.

You won’t run into any boring old oaks or maples in Nicaland…instead you’ll find a startling diversity of exotic arboreal species.  And there is no tree more fun to look at or more dangerous to climb, than pochote.

Pochote is pronounced Poe (like Edgar Allen) - Cho (like Harry's old fling from Ravenclaw) - Tay (like the longest river in Scotland)

The scientific name for pochote is Bombacopsis quinata but it also has a slew of common names depending on which Central American country you're in. In Honduras it's known as aba or cedro espino (meaning "spiny cedar"), in Panama they call it ceibo (not to be confused with ceiba, a different species that also has spines), and in both Nicaragua and Costa Rica it's called pochote.

The current distribution of pochote in Central America

The tree stands out visually because its trunk is pure spines.  Actually, pochote is probably one of the most beautiful trees I’ve ever seen.  (Yes, it seems I have a crush on a tree, sorry ladies.)  There’s something about the way the spines raise organically out of the bark that really catches my eye.  I’ll say it: this tree has sexy spines.

Pochote spines are different than those of a cactus for example…a cactus has spines that are obviously separate from the rest of the plant, they’re a different color and made of some kind of special spine-stuff (a technical term), but pochote spines seem to be part of the bark itself, like they flow out of it.  It looks like someone dropped a pebble into a glass of water and then froze the resulting splash at its apex, right as it forms a perfect cone.  And it looks like someone did that a thousand times, all over the trunk.  Aesthetically, pochote is the best.

The sexy spines go the whole way up the trunk and make a good home for epiphytes like the one seen here

In Nicaragua, pochote is considered to be madera preciosa or “precious wood.”  It’s used primarily for furniture-making and on the interiors of houses as moldings and window frames.  The wood weathers quite well and has a beautiful dark red color.  The problem is that pochote is considered a “threatened” tree species, and despite the fact that there’s a law against cutting down these trees in Nicaragua, they’re being chopped faster than they’re being planted.

In Santa Lucía pochote trees are not super common, but there are more and more of them as you walk higher into the montaña.  As I was wandering around in the woods a while back, I came upon part of the forest that seemed to be nearly all pochotes.  I asked my friend why there were so many and he told me that about five years ago a foreign NGO gave nearly 500 tiny pochote trees to some of the local farmers to plant in deforested zones (Santa Lucía is still in the process of recovering after being almost completely deforested fifteen years ago).  Today there’s a nice-sized grove of about 200 mature pochotes.

Looking down from on high, you can see how there are more open fields (deforestation for cattle fields) closer to town

Another important feature of pochote is its seemingly magical ability to grow.  You can cut off a branch and stick it in the ground, and a few months later, you’ll have a little pochote tree where before you only had a stick in the mud.  This miraculous quality isn’t unique to pochote, but there are a limited number of species that will grow from estaca (“stake”).  Due to this quality, pochotes are often used as fence posts in a common practice called “live fencing.”

Live fencing (drawing from the post Arboriculturalism)

        There’s a downside, however, to growing pochotes using the stake method.  You might think, “Hey, why are these trees ‘threatened’ if they can be grown so easily?”  The thing is, the trees that result from stakes are genetically deficient.  They aren’t true pochotes.  The wood becomes a white color, not the desirable red, and after it’s cut, it rots fairly easily.  So as a living fence post, stake pochotes are great, but after that, they’re not much use.  You wouldn’t want a table made of stake pochote wood.  It seems to me that the idea that you can just cut off a branch and create a new tree might have contributed to why pochote is now considered a “threatened” species…

You can see the beautiful dark red of the wood where the spines have been knocked off

Anyway, I wanted to profess to the world my love for pochotes.  Every single time I see one, I think, “That tree is so cool,” and it would be a real shame if this species were to go extinct someday because human beings slew all of them.

Believe it or not, I actually did a little research for this post to shore up my conocimiento.  For example, I did not know the scientific name by heart, nor all those other names people call pochote in Central America.  I found that information here.

And if you have a hankering for more tree-talk, take a look at my previous post Arboriculturalism here.  That post features more tree drawings and some more on live fencing.

Until the next time, keep it real.  And let's hear it for those sexy spines.  More Anatomy of a Project next.