Plants of the Turks and Caicos Islands

In January 2001 I was lucky enough to spend a week on Middle Caicos island helping the Darwin TCI project there (Directed by Oliver Cheesman from the UK with the National Trust for the Turks and Caicos Islands) to catalogue the biodiversity of a large part of the island that has recently become a reserve. The project, for me, is an extension of work that I did on a similar project in the Cayman Islands with Fred Burton who is also coordinating the vegetation mapping part of this project. Fred and I have an article due out in Kew Bulletin on all of the additions that we made to the known flora of the Cayman Islands during that project. Although facilities in TCI were sparse in comparison to Cayman, I was fortunate to meet and go into the field with the famous bat biologists Tony Hutson and Timothy McCarthy and it was invigorating to spend a week in the field despite the famously prolific mosquitos of Middle Caicos.

There were magnificent two meter tall orchids, Encyclia hodgeana (Hawkes) Beckner, all through the low shrublands there, and I spent an afternoon in a beautiful disjunct population of the Bahama Pine, Pinus caribea var. bahamensis (Griseb.) Barrett and Goldfari. It was a great time to be there because many of the plants were in full bloom. Evolvulus arbuscula Poir., Aristida ternipes Cav., Turnera ulmifolia L., and Rivina humilis L. were common on the ground while Jacquemontia havanensis (Jacq.) Urb., Cassytha filiformis L., Cuscuta americana L., Abrus precatorius L., Centrosema virginianum (L.) Benth. and Angadenia sagraei (A. DC) Miers. wound their way over the shrubs and small trees that make up most of the island’s vegetation. These included Thouinea discolor Griseb., Coccothrinax argentata (Jacq.) L.H. Bailey, Pithecellobium keyense Britt. Ex Britt. And Rose., Mimosa bahamensis Benth, Acacia choriophylla Benth., Lantana involucrata L., Melochia tomentosa L., Manilkara jaimiqui subsp. emarginata (L.) Cronquist, Catesbea spinosa L., and Bourreria ovata Miers. I even saw one cultivated Pseudophoenix sargentii which is native there although despite our best efforts, we could find one in the wild.

I think that I forced Bryan Manco (my in-country host and a Biologist with the TCI National Trust) to summon all of his buddhist serenity when I caught a plant press on fire in his kitchen and refused to throw water on it for fear of ruining the specimens (a common occurrence with systematists) and blew out a tire on our only field vehicle (a common occurrence with this systematist). In the end it was a successful trip and photos of many of the live plants are shown below.

Gerald “Stinger” Guala, Ph.D

Garden Views, 2001 July