11 Rare Trees That Only Exist In Mexico

Deep inside Mexico's mountains, deserts, and islands grow trees that exist naturally nowhere else on Earth. These trees are living products of the country's extreme geography. Relics of ice ages stranded on cold summits, giants of the Sonoran Desert, ancient plants that predate the dinosaurs. We're going to look at 11 of them, each evolved within Mexico and adapted to one particular corner of it. Number one, ponytail palm. The best-known of them is one you may already own. The ponytail palm, or Bocarnia recurvida, is not a palm at all but a member of the asparagus family, with a swollen gray base that stores water and a mop of long, strap-shaped leaves cascading from the top. Its distinctive architecture and its ability to be easily raised from seed have made it a valued ornamental found across the globe, existing in countless millions in cultivation. In Mexico, it's called pata de elefante, elephant's foot, and there are 350-year-old specimens registered in the country. Here's the paradox. It is an endemic plant to Mexico, native to the tropical deciduous forests of Oaxaca and Veracruz, and it is the endemic Mexican plant in greatest demand on the national ornamental market. Because of that demand, it is exploited through illegal trade, resulting in a great decline of wild populations in its natural habitat. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists it as critically endangered in the wild, now confined largely to Veracruz, a plant so common that every garden center sells it and so rare that its own forests are running out of it. Number 2. Martínez piñón. Far less familiar is the Maxipinan Pinus maximartinezii, a small blue-needled pine with a discovery story unlike any other. It escaped science until 1964, when Mexican botanist Jerzy Żydowski noticed some unusually large pine nuts being sold in the markets of towns in the area and investigated to find their source. The trail led him to the Sierra de Morones in southern Zacatecas. What he found was a pine that differs from every other piñón in having very large cones and very large seeds, cones weighing up to 4 pounds. The Zacatecas site was the species' only known locality from its discovery in 1964 until 2010, when a second population was found in extreme southern Durango. The main population numbers approximately 2,000 to 2,500 mature individuals in an area of 400 hectares. And genetic evidence suggests it was once far smaller. The species appears to have derived from an extreme bottleneck, perhaps even a single seed four to five generations ago. An entire species, possibly descended from one pine nut. The same seeds that led to its discovery are now its main threat, since most of the seeds produced are collected, limiting natural regeneration. 3. Bujum Tree In the opposite environment grows the strangest tree in Mexico. The cereo, Phucaria columnaris, rises from the central desert of Baja California like an upside-down carrot, off-white, up to 60 centimeters thick with numerous thin, twiggy branches sticking out at right angles. Some grow perfectly straight. Others loop and arch back to the ground. It is nearly endemic to the Baja California peninsula, with only a small population in the Sierra Bacha of Sonora. Its English name, Bujum, was given by Godfrey Sykes of the Desert Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona, taken from Lewis Carroll's poem, The Hunting of the Snark, in which anyone who meets a Bujum will softly and suddenly vanish away. Sykes named it in 1922 after seeing one through a telescope in Sonora. The Spanish name is more practical, cereo, a wax candle, for the tree's tall, tapered shape when it flowers. The trees can live up to 300 years, and wild harvesting is forbidden by the Mexican government. 4. Chihuahua Spruce High in the Sierra Madre Occidental, where nobody expects to find one, grows a spruce. Spruces are trees of Canada, Siberia, and Scandinavia, and yet Mexico has three species, all of them paleoendemic relics from the Holocene. The Chihuahua spruce, Piquea chihuahuana, is the best studied. It is endemic to Mexico and listed as endangered on the Red List, growing at elevations between 2,150 and 2,990 meters. About 42,600 individuals are distributed in 40 populations, all fragmented, with a total area of less than 300 hectares. Translation, these are the last survivors of forests that covered central Mexico during the Ice Ages, when spruce pollen fell as far south as the Valley of Mexico. As the climate warmed, the spruces retreated up the mountains until they ran out of mountain. They now sit at the edge of what they can survive. 5. Martinez spruce Even rarer is its cousin on the other side of the country. The Martinez spruce, Piquea martinezii, was not discovered by botanists until 1983. It was found in two localities in the Sierra Madre Oriental and was erroneously thought to be Chihuahua spruce, even though the nearest populations of Chihuahua spruce are at least 510 kilometers away, separated by the arid Central Plateau. Only in 1988 did a botanist visit the stands and recognize the spruce as a new species. Think about what that means. A full-sized conifer growing in the mountains of Nuevo León stayed unknown to science until the year of the first Nintendo console. It survives in a handful of stands at elevations between 1,820 and 2,515 meters, its distribution suggestive of relicked post-glacial refuges. The increase in temperature at the end of the last glacial period was about equal to that projected after a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and Mexican spruces may decline to extinction if current projections of global warming materialize. A tree that hid from us for millennia may not survive the century in which we finally found it. 6. Potosi Pinon Higher still, on the very summits of the Sierra Madre Oriental, grows a pine that refuses to become a tree. Pinus colmenicola, whose name is Latin for peak-dweller, is confined to a small area of high summits in Coahuila and Nuevo León and is only abundant on the highest peak, Queiro Potosi, at 3,713 meters. It occurs at very high elevations, from 3,000 to 3,700 meters, in cool, moist subalpine conditions. It is a shrub, reaching 1.5 to 5 meters tall, and it grows at the highest elevations of any pine in the pinon group. Because of its isolation on a handful of remote mountain summits, it escaped discovery until 1959. This is perhaps the only pinon with no history of aboriginal use, as it grows at formerly uninhabited altitudes. Specimens more than 200 years old have been documented. Two centuries of wind and frost, hugging the ground on a mountaintop, waiting for a botanist to climb up and notice. 7. Mexican Beach Beach forests belong to Europe and the eastern United States, except for one strange exception. The Mexican beach, Vegas Mexicana, survives in a few scattered cloud forest pockets of the Sierra Madre Oriental in eastern Mexico. It is closely related to the American beach and, until recently, was frequently treated as a subspecies of it. But recent research has shown it differs in genetics, in morphology, with slenderer leaves, and in its habitat, and it is now accepted as a separate species. One of its best-known stands is a relict population at the Acatlan volcano in Veracruz. These groves are the southernmost beaches in the Americas, stranded fragments of a cooler world, and studies have examined the effects of climate change on the long-term conservation of this important cloud forest species. Translation, the Mexican beach is a European-looking forest hiding in the fog of Veracruz, and the fog is what keeps it alive. 8. Guadalupe Palm 260 kilometers off the Pacific coast of Baja, California, lies Guadalupe Island, and on it grows a palm found nowhere else. Brejea edulis, the Guadalupe Palm, is a fan palm growing 4.5 to 13 meters tall in a grove around 20 hectares in area between 400 and 1,000 meters above sea level on the north end of the island. That altitude, combined with the island's maritime climate, produces one of the few true fog oases in North America. Its story is a near-death experience. Sailors had introduced goats by 1850 to provide a meat reserve for passing ships, and the goat population exploded, reaching an estimated 100,000 animals by 1870. Goats are responsible for the extinction of approximately 25 plantaxa and three endemic birds on Guadalupe. And as fast as seedlings of the palm germinated, they were consumed. For roughly 150 years, the entire native population consisted of old trees with little successful recruitment. Then, after completing the goat eradication in 2007, the native vegetation started to recover. Plants considered extinct or extirpated have been rediscovered. The palm that survived a century and a half of goats is finally allowed to have children. 9. Giant Dune Now, the oldest lineage on this list. Dione spinelosum, the giant dune, is not a palm and not a tree in the botanical sense. It's a cicade, a member of an ancient group of cone-bearing plants that predates flowering plants entirely. It is endemic to limestone cliffs and rocky hillsides in the tropical rainforests of Veracruz and Oaxaca, and it is one of the tallest cicades in the world, growing to 16 meters in height. Its leaves measure 1.5 to 2 meters, with 140 to 240 leaflets each. And its seed cones are among the largest of any ticade, nearly 80 centimeters long and 30 centimeters in diameter. Locals call it Coyolito de Cerro. It is listed as endangered. Picture a plant older than the dinosaurs, growing on a cliff in Oaxaca, producing a cone the size of a small child. That's what Mexico's rainforest has been keeping alive. 10. Aloxochitl Few trees can match the display of Magnolia dielbata, the aloxochitl. Its enormous white flowers open among huge leaves in the cloud forests of Oaxaca, and it carries one of the oldest documented names of any Mexican tree. It was described and illustrated from New Spain under the Nahuatl name aloxochitl, meaning flower of the corncob, by Hernandez in 1651. The Aztecs knew it before the Spanish arrived. Science took nearly two more centuries to formally describe it from Oaxaca in 1837. Today, Magnolia dielbata is understood as endemic to the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca. Its relatives in the same group face a particular threat. People cutting down entire trees to harvest the flowers, which are used ornamentally and in traditional medicine. A tree so beautiful that it gets killed for its blossoms, four centuries after it was first painted for a king. 11. Rzydowski's Pine The final tree returns to the botanist who started this list. Pinus rzydowski, named for Jersey rzydowski, is endemic to Mococan, distributed in the Sierra de Cualcoman in the far west of the state. It is threatened by fire. The population is small and consists of about 12 more or less separate localities, ranging from 1 to 3,500 individuals each, totaling 6,000 to 6,500 trees. And the number of mature trees is probably only around 1,000. All of its populations occur on steep, very rocky limestone soils at elevations around 2,100 to 2,480 meters. Tree ring studies have found individuals 292 years old. There is considerable genetic diversity, indicating a larger population in the past. Translation, this pine remembers being a forest. Today, it's 1,000 adults on a few limestone ridges, one wildfire away from becoming a memory. These 11 trees are unique, but their restricted ranges are exactly what make them vulnerable. Several are listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature or protected under Mexican law. Botanical gardens, island restoration teams, and in the case of the Maxipinan, entire villages have taken on their protection. They are living pieces of Mexico's evolutionary history, Ice Age refugees, desert oddities, plants older than flowers. Once any one of them disappears from Mexico, it disappears from the entire natural world. Which of these 11 did you not know existed? And if you own a ponytail palm, tell me, did you know where it came from? I'll read you in the comments.