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P8 Canary Pine

This is a photo of a Canarian Pine (Pinus canariensis)on the road from Santa Cruz to the observatory.

Canarian pines are amazing. For one thing, they regularly survive forest fires. They can burn for six hours without dying. We had major forest fires in 1994, and for months afterwards my workday commute to and from the observatory passed through the burnt area. It was like a sick parody of winter, with no leaves on the trees, no undergrowth, and dirty-white ash on the ground. It stank of wet bonfire. Then the autumn rains came and within weeks the forest floor had an emerald carpet of new bracken. Soon after that, the trees grew new needles straight out of the trunk. A year later, and the only way to tell where the fire had been was to look closely at the trees. The bark is irregularly cracked, like a giraffe's neck, and you can still find soot deep in the cracks.

For another thing, the pine needles create much of the island's water supply. The pines grow at an altitude where they frequently sit in the clouds, and the needles evolved to condense out water droplets so that they drip onto the ground above the tree's roots. Depending on which source you believe, a bucket under a pine tree will collect five to twenty times as much water as one out in the open. Maybe it depends on the exact temperature and relative humidity in the cloud.

Certainly the climate of Gran Canaria has been much drier since they cut down the forest.

Fuji Velvia, and Yashica 230

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