Colorful Trees

What feels like a most beautiful summer to us with constant 75-degree temperatures and low humidity here in the mountains and 85-90 degrees down at the beach, is really Costa Rica’s cool winter season. The dry season extends from December to May, and it is during this tropical summer, our winter in Oregon, that the Talamanca Mountain’s few deciduous trees drop their leaves.

It is also during this season that Costa Rica’s eye-catching, tall tree species with large, brilliant blossoms are at their most showy best. The displays are dazzling. Entire trees, some of them leafless, become covered with flowers in bright red, gold, orange, pink or purple.

Groves of bare-branched, orange-flowering Poro’, also called mountain immortelle, form magnificent displays cascading down nearby mountain slopes. These trees are interplanted with coffee trees to provide shade during harvest and add nitrogen to the soil. Other flowering trees at our locale include the 40-ft. buttercup, a daintily-named, rugged-trunked tree that bursts into bright yellow bloom overnight.

An African tulip tree with bright red flowers stands near the end of our lane, appearing as if giant tulips have been lopsidedly-glued to the ends of its branches. Cascades of lavender blossoms hang from tall jacaranda trees planted as ornamentals at a few houses in the village; pink trumpet trees and powder-puff mimosas are also common. Thirty-foot yucca trees holding plumes of thick white flowers (edible flowers sold in the market, good with scrambled eggs) dot mountain slopes, as does the tree called flamboyan’, or flamboyant, with its umbrella-like crown of red-yellow flowers.

The blazes of color in the crown of a tree don’t always come from the flowers of the tree itself, however. Colorful epiphytes often perch in high branches where they get more sunlight, and vines like the brilliant-red flowering liana first root in the ground but climb to the tree tops in search of the sun. As these plants and others become larger, they become intermingled with the support tree, where only closer inspection indicates what is truly in bloom. The jungle holds a mind-boggling collection of color, foliage and texture all interdependent on each other.

Tall euculpytus trees with rainbow-streaked trunks stand here and there at the edge of the jungle and hardwood forests. Pecos has plans to make furniture from this exotic wood, not so exotic here. We draw plans for adding trees to our finca, some to protect the spring and others to add crops and color under the tall yellow-flowering amarillon hardwoods that stand on most of the property. The wide, curved area in front and siding our casa will hold smaller trees – like the traveler’s palm, named for its constant east-west orientation – to provide shade for flower and vegetable gardens.

Suess-like, stalky trees stand like sentinels at the edges of the roads and coffee fields near our village. These awkwardly-standing trees hold fence wire and create tall, bushy havens for birds that dart in and out of these trees’ clumpy heads. Poles originally set in the ground as fence posts soon sprout, much like any stick put in Costa Rican soil. Fence posts aren’t replaced; instead, they are trimmed with machetes to keep them in check. 