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Just a quick glance through this book’s index will pique the interest of even the casual reader: angel’s hair, rain tree, gumbo limbo, weeping bottlebrush, mountain immortelle, pink trumpet tree, butterfly palm, and quick stick. Poetic names cascade off the page, and with photographs to match. That said, Tropical Trees of Costa Rica—and its companion volume, Tropical Blossoms of Costa Rica—is about more than the aesthetics of tropical flora. In these pages, the author introduces the general reader to the fascinating natural history of a variety of trees that occur in Costa Rica. The text covers a range of topics: plant-animal relationships; medicinal and psychotropic properties of various tree parts; importance of the tree to indigenous cultures—and to modern industrial society; use in horticulture; general geographic distribution (along with information about where the tree occurs in Costa Rica); origin of common and scientific names; and more.
As many of the species that are described in Tropical Trees of Costa Rica also occur in other countries in Latin America (and Africa and Asia), this book will likely stand you in good stead on your next trip to a tropical country.
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Willow Zuchowski, a botanist, guide, author, and illustrator, has lived in Monteverde, Costa Rica for more than twenty years. Turid Forsyth's photographs, paintings, and illustrations have been published in popular books and magazines and exhibited in galleries in Germany, the United States, and Canada. ISBN: 0-9705678-7-1 |