Ipomoea alba at our Mayan Ethnobotanical Research garden, Guatemala CIty, 1500 meters altitude.
Photo taken with a Nikon D5, natural light, no flash, Gitzo tripod, early evening (circa 6:15pm).
The flower at the right opened first; the flower at the right opened about six minutes later.
On www.FLAAR.org home page we show a third flower that opened 3 minutes later about one meter away.
Ipomoea alba is one of several "morning glory vines" whose juice allowed the Olmec, Maya, Aztec and all their neighbors to vulcanize rubber (thousands of years before Thomas Goodyear thought he had "invented" vulcanization).
We also have the other vine (different Genus and species) in our garden and hope to get the others growing soon. This other vine grows within two meters of Castilla elastica trees (native Mesoamerican rubber tree) out in the wild. Ipomoea alba grows about 20 km away (in same eco-system).
We photographed the opening sequence so we can make a video (out of the 350 individual photos we took over a 12 minute period).
Will take a while to turn all the photos into the video, so check back later this summer.
Here is a sample of the 4-petalled flowers we have found growing in remote areas of Guatemala.
4-petalled flowers were used to decorate Late Classic (Tepeu 2) polychrome vases, bowls, and plates throughout the Peten and adjacent areas.
I discovered two bowls with 4-petalled flower designs in Burial 196, Tomb of the Jade Jaguar, Tikal Str. 5D-76, in 1965, while a Harvard student working as an architectural and photographic student intern on the University of Pennsylvania Tikal Project.
4-petaled flowers and 4-rows sepalos.
I have always been curious what actual flowers were the models. My ICA Salamanca 2018 lecture on this topic will be posted next week. Then later we will issue a PDF showing the entire list of 4-petalled flowers that exist in Guatemala, and indicate which we have found and photographed, and which we still need to locate so we can photograph them.
We have discovered totally unexpected epigraphic and iconographic documentation during the recent 6 years of photographic field trips in every eco-system of Guatemala.
Canon EOS 1Dx Mark II , EF100mm f/2.8 Macro USM Lens, f/10, 1/125, ISO 125
While in Izabal several weeks ago, courtesy of the many hospitable people we know there, we found two areas with wild vanilla orchid vines. One was at water level (literally), alongside the Izabal waterways. The second was about 10 km away, in the hills south of Lago Izabal.
In each location there were “wild vanilla orchid vines everywhere around us.”
Experienced orchid botanist Fredy Archilla is letting us know when other vanilla orchid vines elsewhere may bloom. Plus we have several contacts who have told us about wild vanilla vines that their friends know about.
It is essential NOT to collect wild vines from the forests without special permission. It is even more helpful that the trees are not chopped down: vanilla orchid vines require trees to grow, flower, and produce vanilla pods.
More to come, but we definitely want to have Guatemala given more space in ALL future articles and monographs on vanilla orchids of the world. The Maya of Tikal and of El Mirador had orchid vines. We estimate wild vanilla vines can be found at Parque Nacional Yaxha Nakum Naranjo.
We are also working on Muc (Orejuela, a seasoning) and wild bamboo native to Guatemala… yes, bamboo of the Mayan areas: not bamboo from Asia.
Canon EOS 6D, 300mm, f/7.1, 1/1400, ISO 500, 11:56am, Feb. 11 2018, Bocas de Polochic River, Melanny Quiñonez, FLAAR.
More Ceiba pentandra trees are visible along the Rio Polochic from Lake Izabal towards Panzos than almost anywhere else in the country. I personally experienced more ceiba trees this one day (Feb. 11th_2018) than in my previous 54 years of being in front of Ceiba trees throughout Mesoamerica.
More than 25% were flowering. Ceiba pentandra trees are very individual and independent of whether they will flower any given year. And you can have several ceiba trees together in the same field and some will be in flower yet others will have full leaf growth (which means no flowering whatsoever that month or perhaps that year).
I was also very surprised to note that many of these Ceiba pentandra trees were growing in seasonal swamp areas. A few were physically adjacent to the Rio Polochic (as I would expect their relatives, Pachira aquatica). Although there are lots of Pachira aquatica trees around Lake Izabal, I did not notice one single zapoton along the Rio Polochic (whose water is the source of Lake Izabal!).
I took over 400 photographs: 60mm Sigma lens, 100mm Zeiss lens, 200mm using a Nikon D810; 400mm, and 600mm Nikkor prime telephoto lenses with a Nikon D5 on a Wimberley WH-200 gimbal tripod head II on a 20+ year old awesome quality Gitzo tripod.
FLAAR Reports has two divisions; you are now on one of the web sites of the tropical Mesoamerica flora and fauna team. If you are interested in wide-format inkjet printers, we have an entire network to explain this technology: www.wide-format-printers.org
There is also a growing team of illustrators and graphic designers who do educational children’s books (to show the world the remarkable plants and animals of 2000 years of Mayan civilization in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador).
