Florida Fishpoison Tree

 Piscidia piscupula, the Florida fish poison tree, Jamaica dogwood, or fishfuddle tree, is a tropical hardwood native to south Florida and the Keys, the West Indies, Bahamas, and parts of Central America and Mexico. It is semi-deciduous, ie - shedding its leaves quickly, remaining bare only for a short time  before pushing out new growth. Flowers appear on bare or nearly bare stalks. It hit its flowering peak in the last week of May, and first week of June this year. 

Piscidia piscipula in bloom; 
edge of Johnson Bay, Isles of Capri, FL

The name "Jamaica dogwood" refers to its use in boat building. South Florida naturalist Roger Hammer reports that "dogs" are spikes or bars used as fasteners in ship construction. The flowers certainly don't look anything like the dogwoods most North Americans know. The wood is very  hard and apart from boats, is used for wood carving, fence posts and charcoal. 

Flowers

Typical "pea" flowers are borne in elongated clusters (racemes), and appear before, and sometimes overlapping with the year's new growth. Under magnification, they are hairy, especially the cup-like calyx, which appears to be a soft grayed lavender, like a mole's skin, due to the tiny hairs. Parts of the flower itself also bear silky hairs that are pressed flat on their surface. Flower color can vary quite a bit, from white tinged with pink or lavender, to red, to muddy gray. Like other members in the family, they attract a lot of pollinators, especially bees.

The bark and leaves contain rotenone, among other chemicals, and when tossed in the water, stun small fish, which float to the surface and can be harvested, hence the name "fishpoison." This practice is illegal in Florida, though we've reached such a state of general ignorance that I doubt anybody under 60 even knows the trick. 

Rotenone supposedly doesn't harm warm-blooded animals, but the plant contains plenty of other substances that do. Dried root bark is used  both internally and externally in folk medicine to relieve pain and insomnia to the point of unconsciousness, and to treat nervous disorders and skin ailments, but the plant's toxic/medicinal potential remains largely uninvestigated. Dried extract is available on the Internet, but I don't plan to play lab rat myself! For one thing, there seem to be no generally accepted dosage guidelines, but plenty of warnings.

The tree, which can reach 30-50 feet tall, with a broad, spreading crown, can make a striking specimen where it is not crowded. In shade and  competition from other plants it stays pretty spindly and unimpressive.  Osorio calls it "underutilized" in the Florida landscape. A sucking insect, the Jamaica Dogwood Psylla, occasionally can make the leaves unsightly, but again, acccording to Roger Hammer, doesn't make it undesirable in the landscape. It is highly drought tolerant once established, and grows behind the dune line on beaches, and in sand, rocky or gravelly soil elsewhere. Rather than falling over in storms, it tends to lose branches. 

Multi-trunked specimen,
Parking Lot, Collier-Seminole State Park
Collier County, FL

What first may appear to be leaves are actually leaflets. Like other members of the family, the fishpoison tree has compound leaves. They alternate along the branch, and typically have 4-8 pairs of leaflets plus a single terminal leaflet. The leaflets can vary in shape from more or less oblong to more oval, and the tips can be blunt, rounded or even pointed. They are fairly leathery on  top, and hairs  can give the underside a velvety feel. The leaves appear near the end of the flowering period. Leaves and individiual leaflets in the subfamily Faboidae, to which Piscidia piscipula belongs, are characterized by a swollen structure where they join the petiole or stem, called the "pulvinus." The leaves are a dark, matte green on top, and a lighter, softer shade on the underside. Varying pressure levels within the pulvinus cause the leaves and leaflets to fold up, seemingly at nighttime, but studies have shown that this is a biological rhythm not triggered by light levels. 

Piscidia
3 Mature Leaves; 3 Emerging Leaves

Members of Faboideae also are associated with the famous "nitrogen-fixing" bacteria, varioius species of Rhizobium. These symbiotic soil organisms "infect" root hairs of certain plants, especially members of Faboideae, where they transform atmospheric nitrogen into an ammonium form that can be used by the plant to produce plant protein. In turn, the bacteria gain carbohydrates from the host plant. Usually each Rhizobium species is limited to a single host species. Such complexity is probably one reason supposed "restoration" projects may fail, for replanting alone is a pretty simplistic approach. 

Black seeds are borne in a papery winged structure that passes from pink, green, yellow to brown. The tree apparently will grow readily from seed, as well as cuttings, so readily, in fact, that limbs used for fence posts make take root!

Seed Pods

The native Cassius Blue butterfly and the black and silver Hammock Skipper use the leaves as larval hosts. 

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I have relied heavily on the following sources for this article:

Roger Hammer. Florida Keys Wildflowers. Falcon. 2004. p.177. Email conversation.

Rufino Osorio. A Gardener's Guide to Florida Native Plants. University Press of Florida. 2001. pp. 265-6.

J. Paul Scurlock. Native Trees & Shrubs of the Florida Keys. Laurel Press. 1987, p. 123.

Wendy B. Zomlefer. Guide to Flowering Plant Families. University of North Carolina Press. 1994. pp. 160-166.

What Goes Around Comes Around - Musings from a Disjointed Year

 Or is it the other way around?

One evening in mid-March my husband remarked that there was something resembling,"a mocking bird on steroids," in the Simpson's Stopper. It was dusk, and all I saw was a dark silhouette flying off. I reckoned that it must have been a bluejay, though I really wasn't convinced. 

A few mornings later I had my answer when I startled a pair of brown thrashers that were searching for food by vigorously tossing bits of mulch with side-to-side, sweeping head motions. By the way, they made pretty deep holes. They left sometime in late April or early May - my last recorded sighting was April 27th.

We were visited by a pair of brown thrashers for the first time, as far as I know, in the winter/spring of 2018. The region was still recuperating from a direct hit by Hurricane Irma in September, 2017, and I attributed their presence to a general natural disruption. 

I hadn't seem them in the intervening years, but that doesn't mean they haven't been here. For one thing, our garden and the ones of our adjoining neighbors have recovered and filled out considerably, so these shy birds have a much better chance of hiding. 

For another, I haven't been outside as much. I injured my elbow cleaning up after Irma, so there are times that I physically can't do the down and dirty gardening I love. Increasing age and decreasing agility also meant giving up our beloved day-sailing activity. Instead of spending more time outside to compensate, I retreated indoors.

 For reasons that are not clear to me at all, I virtually stopped sketching outside. Botanical illustration requires an attention to detail largely unavailable in field sketching, but analyzing and depicting a part of a plant indoors doesn't produce the whole story. Field sketching includes context - what else is growing, what the weather and seasons are doing, what animals may be skittering around. After you've sat sketching for a while, birds either don't notice you, or decide you're not too much a threat to go about their business nearby. Small snakes have such a ground-level perspective that they just slither over my feet, but of course, disappear quickly when I jump from their touch. 

And field sketching, like sailing and gardening,  not only gets you out of the house - it gets you out of yourself, away from your own belly-button. It becomes a sort of meditation - not a meditation about anything - just a state of mind without thoughts - a pure sort of concentration on conditions around you at the moment. 

Encyclia tampensis 'alba' - Bloomed in May

Blame it on COVID isolation, politics, world events, old age  - whatever - I recently realized that instead of heading out into the yard with my coffee and sketchbook before and after breakfast, I turn on the computer to read about the most recent disasters. That has to change, but bad habits persist, while good ones are hard to re-establish. 

Apart from tanking my productivity and contributing to a general sense of malaise, this virtual life I've been leading has deeper implications. 

When I stopped recording the version of the natural world that exists in our own backyard, I lost touch with something bigger. Edward Wilson's philosophy in his very personal account Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species (1984), proposes that  our very humanity  is rooted in our co-evolution with and along with all other life forms. In that sense he arguess that conservation should be understood in terms of, "protection of the human spirit." (p.140). According to Wilson, and borne out by my own recent experience, we need to maintain contact with the natural world to feel fully ourselves.

The increasing digitalization and virtualization of our daily lives threatens dire consequences. How  much of the alienation behind homelessness, dropout rates, mental illness and even murder can be linked to our increasing estrangement with the organic world in which we evolved? The computer is sometimes called a "window on the world," but have we forgotten about just looking out a real window at a real universe? Tethered to our devices, we risk floating thorough our lives with no anchors at all. 

Simplistic sloganeering or "back to nature" campaigns won't do it. But somehow, as a society, we need to unplug from the sterile, technological ersatz world in which we've started living, and establish a connection and appreciation for what's left of the real. 

Ludisia discolor - Terrestrial Orchid (not native)

Back to local reality, we've had our annual visitation by flocks of Southern White and Florida White butterflies. The swallowtail kites graced our skies with their acrobatics, and too soon, returned to South America. Songbirds like the thrashers visited on their return migrations northward. The Jamaica Caper and Seven-Year Apple are again covered with fragrant blooms, and the brilliant red-orange blooms of royal poincianas justify their Spanish name, "Flamboyant." 

There is something deeply comforting in these rhythms and patterns. As much as we try, we still haven't quite destroyed the natural world. Weeds, even flowers, still sprout in cracks in the concrete, and the Gaillardias have reseeded faithfully in what I euphemistically call the garden. Winters are too warm now for my native iris to bloom, and rising tide levels are killing mangroves. But the tides still rise and fall acccording to their rhthyms, not ours. 

Not everything in the garden is lovely, but at least there still are fragments of that original garden, and if we only will go out and look, we may be graced by glimpses of it.