Wednesday, June 6, 2018

Baja Elephant Tree



Here's a tree at the Desert Botanical Garden that I hadn't paid much attention to before.  The last time I was there, I noticed how sort of dried out it look so I snapped a couple of photos and when I got home I looked up Elephant Tree.  It appears that there is another tree that goes by the same name so I looked up the latin name for it "Pachycormus discolor".

It turns out that the tree isn't dry at all.  Those are actually blooms on the tree and they have a pinkish hue to them.

By the way, the term "pachy" means thick and "cormus" means stump.  The name refers to the thick trunk on the tree.  Interesting!

10 comments:

biebkriebels said...

The "dry"tree looks beautiful, good you made the photo!

Andy said...

The old tree's colour makes me think of autumn.

Lowell said...

You do find the most interesting things. This is another of those things of which I've never heard! It's kind of scraggly-looking but so are elephants. And I'm guessing that if it weren't for those blooms that don't look like blooms at all, the tree would look even more scraggly. But that's OK, we've got scraggly trees here, too. None of them are elephants, though! :))

Kate said...

A very interest tree and great photo of the tree silhouetted agains the beautiful blue sky

RedPat said...

It looks lovely against that blue sky!

William Kendall said...

It does stand out well!

PerthDailyPhoto said...

When you pull the shot in for a closer look it's really pretty Sharon, all those delicately pale pink flowers. Tres interesting to see.

Judy Ryer said...

I never heard of that tree. Isn't it great that we can look things up so easily? I remember when we had to grab an encyclopedia or go to the library.

Amy said...

Thats really neat, I don't think we have these here.

Steve Reed said...

I would never have guessed those were flowers! They definitely look like dry leaves.