Plants and places: Andalucia

Last Sunday I returned from a week's holiday in Andalucia. Eight days, taking in the sights of Malaga, Granada, Seville and Jerez - as well as a couple of places in between (Cadiz, Ronda, and the occasional dustbowl-with-a-petrol-station which claimed to be a town). 

It was fantastic, not just because it was 20°C+. And sunny. And I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. In October. All of these things were very exciting, but to me were slightly secondary to the fantastic botanical delights Andalucia had in store.

Bird of Paradise (Strelitzia reginae)

I knew to expect oranges - after all, Seville is famous for its bitter oranges used in marmalade (I only remembered this halfway through the world's sourest orange scrumped from a public park). But having never been closer to the equator than Athens, the amazing diversity of flora and fauna in Andalucia was a totally unexpected pleasant surprise to me.

Excitingly, plants that in the UK are delicate houseplants, such as Jasminum officinale (jasmine), grew rampantly over the trellises of Malaga's Alcazabar; Schefflera arboricola (the umbrella plant), which is best known in the UK as a houseplant tolerant of neglect and unlove, was growing wild at the foot of the palace; and vast yards of cacti, that you could only dream of cultivating in temperate regions, grew as weeds on the hillsides of Granada. 

It was exciting to see these plants in situ and get a real appreciation for their natural habitat. It's one thing to see a greenhouse-grown orange tree in the Cotswolds with a single paltry fruit and say 'this is how it likes to grow'; it's another to see lines of orange trees, baked by the Andalucian sun, producing easy tons - I kept thinking to myself - as though they were apples.

Las naranjas de Sevilla/ Seville Oranges (Citrus × aurantium)

As I was travelling around, something else struck me, too. In horticulture, we learn a lot about plants' natural adaptations - be it leaf size, shape or structure, root depth etc. - that enable them to thrive in often very specific conditions. In Andalucia, there were some textbook examples of how trees and plants are suited to the mediterranean climate.

Apart from the fact it has stunning, iridescent pink pompoms for flowers and develops seeds in strange bean-like pods, the Mimosa tree is a fascinating case in point. Its bipinnate compound leaves (i.e. leaves composed of rows of tiny pointed leaflets) actually have a relatively small surface area. The leaves are also mobile, able to close up in response to low light levels (other varieties are able to close in response to touch), optimising the exposure to light for photosyntheis and ensuring low loss of water through transpiration.

Mimosa (Albizin julibrissin)

I started to notice that this was a bit of a theme - lots of the trees of Seville had feathery leaves with a low surface area, including this tree (to me, it looked like a relative of the willow).

A Spanish relative of the willow?

Some trees took it to the extreme. This tree in particular was comprised a mass of fine filaments of feathery leaves, with the result that you couldn't even see the trunk or branches.

A mass of feathery leaves

A final point - you can't go to Andalucia without seeing palm trees - they are as common in amenity planting as cotoneaster in the UK. However, I found something it is unusual to see over here: beside the cathedral of Jerez is a public space, planted with palm trees, but there were spaces where a palm had been cut down. You don't often get the chance to see a palm stump, but it demonstrates a really interesting point about the tree - that it's not really a tree at all. 

Just pretending: the palm is not a true tree

That's because palms are monocots (they have fibrous roots and stems and bandy leaves with scattered veins) and also herbaceous - they don't have the capability to produce the secondary growth we know as wood. So there's not a single tree ring in sight!

Ringless palm stump!