The Ethnobotanical Garden

 

Wednesday morning I reserved for the all important visit to Oaxaca’s ethnobotanical garden, right in the heart of the historic downtown area.  Originally a Dominican monastery and then a military base after President Benito Juarez separated the powers of church and state, it became the ethnobotanical garden in 1998, narrowly escaping becoming a convention center and parking lot.  Currently the garden is only open for guided tours.  I got there before 10:30 for the 11am tour in English.  The tour in English is for some reason twice as long (2 hours) as the tour in Spanish and only once a day, and it often reaches capacity. 

Oaxaca has some of the highest plant diversity in Mexico and the garden hopes to eventually represent 10% of that diversity, or about 1300 species.  It is divided into geographical sections including the Central Valley where the city is located, the dry forest, and the tropical moist forest.  There is also a section for plants with an affinity for alkaline soils, an agricultural section, and an Arts section with amazing displays of cacti.  Our guide quite capably kept the 30 of us in line and had a strong voice.  She was trained as an architect but had a good knowledge of the plants.  None of the plants have signs and she only referred to them by their common names for the most part.  The garden does eventually plan to have a self-guided tour.

I was very excited to see teosinte, the ancient ancestor of modern corn, growing in the agricultural area.  It even had little ears!  We were also introduced to a relative of cacao, rosita de cacao, whose flower is used to make a beverage called tejate.  Also of interest were the quelites, wild herbs used in cooking like hierba de conejo, Tridax coronopifolia, in the Aster family.  This herb happened to reappear as a garnish on Jake’s lunch today and it has a refreshing flavor with a hint of anise.

Rosita de cacao flower

Teosinte

an ear of teosinte

The tropical forest area has a new greenhouse specially designed with geothermal energy to keep it cool on hot days.  The garden uses only water collected from roof runoff for the tropical section of the garden.  The other areas have plants that should be able to survive with the city’s natural rainfall.

The tropical dry forest had several species of trees in the pea family and the cotton family, including the shaving brush tree, Pseudobombax ellipticum.

 

The Dominicans had built a lime kiln to make cement, so the garden features a few palms, agaves and other plants particularly well adapted to alkaline soils in this area.  Another large section of the garden has huge organ and Opuntia cactuses as well as several rare barrel cactuses rescued from the biosphere reserve when the Panamerican Highway was widened. 

Plants adapted to alkaline soils

Our guide ended with describing how we probably wouldn’t be visiting Oaxaca if it weren’t for the cochineal industry.  The Spanish were unsuccessful at getting slaves to produce high quality cochineal in great demand for the red dye the scale insects produce, so they gave land back to the indigenous people in return for having them produce cochineal.  Some people I’ve talked to have said that the strong indigenous land rights in this part of Mexico are partly responsible for the low crime rates.  The importance of tourism and distance from any international borders have also been listed as reasons why the drug cartels have been kept out.