urbpan | Jardin Botanico, Universidad de Puerto Rico, part one

In our last hours in Puerto Rico, we went to the Jardin Botanico at the University of Puerto Rico. I took more pictures there, in a few short hours, than I did on any other day of the trip. We do love botanical gardens, what with their conveniently labeled plants and attractiveness to wildlife. This one was a bit undermaintained, with some crumbling bridges and neglected pathways, and we pretty much had the place to ourselves. Nonetheless, it was a great ending to our vacation. I'll break this into two or three posts, so as not to overwhelm you.

I love palm trees--nothing else telegraphs "tropical" so efficiently. This one has ferns growing out of its trunk.

If you ever want to know if a plant is a fern, flip over a leaf (a frond, if it is indeed a fern) and look for rows of dots called sori. These are the places that make the reproductive spores of the plants.

I don't know the name of this plant, but there were many of them. Back in Hawaii, at the National Tropical Botanical Garden, I photographed a similar plant (red ginger Alpinia purpurata) that had an anole in it.

One of the main highlights for us was a little waterway that was a locus for wildlife. Here are a pair of gallinules.

This great egret let us get very close.

All at once we heard a big splash, like someone throwing a tire into the river. A few seconds later I saw a domestic cat running along the bank. Then this iguana came swimming down between the egret and the gallinules. I'm guessing the cat spooked the iguana off a basking perch and it jumped into the water.

I saw one other iguana earlier in the week, crossing the road. Something about giant lizards makes me very happy.

I must admit I was a bit disappointed with Puerto Rico's tiny spiders--this was the biggest I saw, only about 3/4 inch legspan. There were dozens in webs over the river--colonial spiders maybe? Or just a high density of spiders due to high prey availability?

If you click that "National Tropical Botanical Garden" link above, you'll see that we encountered this tree there as well, identified in the comments to the post as a "ponytail palm" Beaucarnea recurvata.

Is this a bird of paradise flower or some kind of heliconia? It's nice to see this kind of flower in a semi-wild setting, rather than wrapped in cold mylar at Trader Joes.

Bamboo, introduced to help control erosion, grows quite well in Puerto Rico. We saw it bent down over roads and stressing power lines up by Casa Cubuy.