A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
palo verde
The palo verde is a desert tree of the Sonoran and neighboring deserts with a smooth green trunk and green branches, tiny leaves it drops in dry weather, and a haze of yellow flowers in spring. The green is chlorophyll in the bark: the tree photosynthesizes through its own trunk, so it keeps working through the months it has no leaves at all. It is the state tree of Arizona.
Etymology
The name is Spanish for green stick, which is exactly right and needs no improving. Two species dominate: the blue palo verde along washes, with a bluish cast to the bark, and the foothill palo verde on slopes, which is yellower and grows more slowly. The Latin genus name means, roughly, parent tree, which is a reference to the way the branches are structured rather than to anything ecological.
Notes
Palo verde is the principal nurse plant of the saguaro. A young saguaro needs shade and shelter for its first decades and almost always starts under one, and the pair grow together for a century until the cactus outlives the tree. A dead palo verde standing beside a mature saguaro is one of the most ordinary sights in that desert and one of the most easily misread.