Just back from the moringa collection to collect leaves for genetic analysis and seeds for micro-RNAs. Here are some photos of flowers, fruits, and other things from June and August in the collection. Lots of collection maintenance this month- planting new plants, erosion control moving grumpy plants to locations we hope they will like better. Hopefully lots more flowers and fruits to report next blooming season!
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Five months after Hurricane Patricia plowed directly over the Moringa collection, the plants are looking good. We lost about 30% of the plants that were planted out in the botanical garden, mostly the smaller ones. Some of the larger plants went dormant and are still leafless. Though they have never done this before, and have kept their leaves through the dry season sans hurricane, in general leaflessness is normal for this time of year, which is the height of the dry season. And like many plants of tropical drylands, Moringa species flower at the height of the dry season and shed their seeds just before the rains come. Despite the battering they took back in October, some plants are flowering for the first time here. Moringa oleifera, M. drouhardii, M. concanensis, M. stenopetala, M. rivae, and M. longituba have flowered before, but it’s the first time that we’ll have more than one M. longituba and more than one M. rivae in flower at the same time. I will be in the field when they open, but I am trusting humminbirds and bees to do the right thing. It would be the first time we get seed from these species from our own plants. Just as exciting, it’s the first time that M. borziana flowers in the collection (they nearly did in October/November, but Patricia blew all the buds off). Not only that, but it looks like three plants will bloom at the same time, so again fingers are crossed for seeds. Also, here are what as far as I know are the first photographs ever of Moringa hildebrandtii flowers, which I had never seen before. They are described in the literature as being slightly bilaterally symmetrical, but this is not really evident in these flowers. What is interesting and unique in the family is the long “claw” (the petal “stalk”), and the very short “limb” (the “petal” part of the petal). Not only is the limb short, but it withers and turns brown almost immediately after opening. The result is a vivid combination of yellows and browns in the floral display of Moringa hildebrandtii. Alberto’s Moringa oleifera experiment on the relationship between plant size, leaf area, and stem length got flattened in October and has come back nicely. He and Diana have started harvesting plants and have made excellent progress. Hopefully we’ll have a manuscript by the end of the year. Finally, a few photos of the plants in the collection plus some local animals, in this case an anole lizard Anolis nebulosus I think, which is common in the collection, plus some ibises, which I had seen in the area but never in the collection itself. In my previous post, based on my vast experience of 2 days in Manila, I concluded that moringa was well loved in the Philippines, but mostly in the low rent parts of town. I take this back. After a few more days of walking, busing, metroing, and jeepneying around Manila and environs, I can say that everyone including dwellers in the fanciest mansions in town love moringa. Moringas are conspicuous here on roadsides, in vacant lots, on streets, and in the yards and lots of houses. You even see them poking up behind the forbidding walls of rich villas. All of the other plants around these mansions are impeccable: perfect palms, groomed plumerias, perfectly painted walls, tiled roofs. Except the moringas. Seeing the moringas spreading their cheerful, game, sprawling, unkempt crowns side by side with their formal and fancy neighbors is a charming sight, like a dirty but irresistable dog that somehow got into a classy dog show. And the love of moringas doesn't stop at gardens. Here are some photos from the local supermarket, local markets, and local restaurants of moringa, showing that moringa really is loved by everyone in the Philippines. And Filipinos get it right-- they eat the leaves, the most nutritious and probably the best nutraceutical part of the plant. They also seem to have developed the mildest tasting moringa varieties. Moringa is an underutilized model for studying plant hydraulics. It grows so quickly that it is possible to have a respectable tree in less than a year, and even flowers at 6 months old. We are using moringa for various experiments on plant hydraulics (see subsequent posts), but for the moment we need space to grow the plants. We decided to clear the brush and rocks from an irregular patch, and fill it in with dirt to level it out. This required getting a backhoe in to do the heavy lifting, and in just a few hours, complete with careful maneuvering among the big moringas already in place, we had a large flat space ready for planting. FundingThis project is made possible by grant RT200515 of the Programa de Apoyo a Proyectos de Investigación e Innovación Tecnológica of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Folks often write to ask me where to purchase large quantities of moringa seeds. If they are here in Mexico, I usually send them to my friend the Moringa Queen of Tepoztlán Maricela Escobar (maricela.esco@hotmail.com). But most come from other countries, and so they need an international source of seeds, one that ships world wide. Here is what I usually tell them: Hi there, One source for PKM moringa is Paritosh Herbals, in Dehradun, India. Their website is www.paritoshherbals.com and the email of the owner, Paritosh Gulati, is paritoshherbals@gmail.com. I have never ordered from them, so I can’t say from personal experience, but I have been receiving their email updates for ten years or so, so it is clear that they are not a fly-by-night operation. Good luck and let me know if you have additional questions. Best wishes, Mark Well, I finally did order some seed from Paritosh, and so now can speak from personal experience. I have been receiving Paritosh’s seed, leaf powder, and oil prices for years and years, from “Paritosh Herbals, Dehradun, India.” I have sent I don’t know how many people to him, and even exchanged an email or two. So while we were in Dehradun, one of the things I wanted to do was finally meet him in person. What I found out what that, not only has Paritosh been sending high-quality moringa seed around the world for years now, but that he’s also an incredibly nice and interesting guy. After talking on the phone a few times while we were in town, we arranged to meet at a prominent crossroads. We waited for a couple of minutes and Paritosh zipped up on a motorcyle, dodging the traffic and the pedestrians. He found us quickly and told us to follow him and he led us through a pleasant neighborhood in Dehradun’s southwest. We talked about moringa, about his longstanding business, and had an absolutely delicious dinner. He sends seed of PKM moringa, which he gets from high quality growers in southern India, all over the world. He works closely with technicians at Dehradun’s Forest Research Institute to treat the seeds and make the diagnostic cultures needed to show that they do not have any pathogens, and issue phytosanitary certificates. All this at a reasonable price and from a guy who is fun to talk to and can answer your questions about moringa and beyond. So now can write an email like the following:
Hi there, The best source I know of for PKM moringa is Paritosh Herbals, in Dehradun, India. Their website is www.paritoshherbals.com and the email of the owner, Paritosh Gulati, is paritoshherbals@gmail.com. I have ordered from them and know Paritosh personally, and I can say that he has great prices, prompt service, including phytosanitary certificate, and seeds with excellent germination. He has been in business selling moringa for many years and is a dependable businessman who I can definitely recommend. Good luck and let me know if you have additional questions. Best wishes, Mark I had the pleasure of attending the second Mexican Moringa conference, at the University of Nuevo León, Monterrey, on 22 May of this year. The conference is mostly thanks to Dr. Emilio Olivares Sáenz, who runs a really exciting division of “protected agriculture,” i.e. plants grown in greenhouses and similar structures, at the university’s ag campus in General Escobedo on the northern fringe of Mexico’s northern metropolis. A testament to his energy is that the protected agiculture center has its own building, offices, labs, in addition to the requisite greenhouses. It’s all spanking new and a really nice facility. What is most amazing to me is that they hold various academic conferences throughout the year, every year. Anyone who has organized even a single conference knows that the logistics are very time consuming. How Emilio and his team manage to get so much done is impressive, as is the Regio (the adjective for folks from Monterrey) style: energetic, pleasant, and no nonsense. Emilio explained how the university bureaucratic procedures are intended to make work easy for the academics, for travel, purchases, and meetings. For a university anywhere, let alone Mexico, that’s an amazing and precious thing. As to the conference itself, it was an interesting mix of growers/producers and academics working on the plant. Particularly interesting were the experiences by Emilio and his associates growing moringa way up north in Mexico in the Monterrey area. This is way outside of moringa’s usual comfort zone, with frosts in winter being light but regular occurrences. The plants get killed back to the branches and sometimes main trunks, but the growers find that the production is enough for their needs, which include a very impressive self-contained organic farm. Emilio and his students gave us a tour of their moringa plantations, which included plants outside, exposed to the cold, as well as in greenhouses. I show some photos here because they exemplify very high density planting. You can see them grown in rows like traditional crops, with views including seedlings as well as year-old plants. You can see how the trunks get gnarled after repeated harvesting down to near ground level. One of the most interesting and important experiments that they showed us was a series of nutrient deprivation trials. They grew moringas in pots and grew them in media and fertilized them with solutions that lacked a single key nutrient, including the plantsman’s trinity of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. The effect of this treatment was to produce plants that showed the symptoms of these deficiencies and deficiencies only of each one of these nutrients. They then photographed and carefully described the symptoms of each deficiency. This means that it will be possible, when you see your moringa looking sad, to know exactly what nutrient it is lacking. I hope they make this resource available soon because it is going to be invaluable. In short, the meeting was very interesting and I hope to be able to attend the next one. Congratulations, Emilio, for the great work. AcknowledgementsThe ongoing work I presented at the conference was funded by grant RT200515 of the Programa de Apoyo a Proyectos de Investigación e Innovación Tecnológica of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
No posts for quite a while because there has been a lot of work to do. We now have over 100 plants planted out in the botanical garden since June and the plants are doing wonderfully. Moringa oleifera always grows magnificently, and most of the plants are already over 3 meters tall and branching profusely. The ones along the western fence, which will form a living fence, have already been pruned to fence post height. The most dramatic growth has been in the Malagasy species. Some of the Moringa hildebrandtiis are nearly 3 meters tall with trunks more than 8 cm in diameter, all from seed this year. I finally got some of my Moringa drouhardiis in the ground, after more than ten years in pots. Others are from seed planted this year. Either way, they are all doing very well. The Moringa stenopetalas are well on their way to forming a forest, with many of them over 3 meters tall. My Moringa ovalifolias all were less than 20 cm tall, and all are 14 years old and have lived in small pots all their lives. Like a lot of plants from seasonal climates, from the spacing between leaf scars on the stems of Moringa ovalifolia you can work out how old a given stem is. The scars get closer together toward the end of the growing season. I could count 13 annual increments on many of the stems, just a few cm tall. The plants have grown more in stem height and in diameter in 3 months than they have in 13 years. As to the non-oleifera slender trees, Moringa concanensis grows a little differently than its close relative Moringa oleifera. It tends to stay in a tuberous phase a little longer than M. oleifera, especially if it’s kept in a pot. It grows up into a magnificent, large leaved sapling, stiffer and more dramatic than M. oleifera, before branching out. There are just a few M. peregrinas in the ground at the moment, but they are doing well. Normally M. peregrina works on its tuber for a very long time before making a permanent aerial stem. I have 1 year old seedlings that already have a stem, and tubers from seed I collected in 1996 from different provenances. The ones from more northerly localities, like the Golan and Egypt, and even northern Oman, are more reluctant to make aerial stems, whereas the more tropical ones, such as from the Dhofar region of Oman, as well as from Sudan, seem to be more prone to making aerial stems directly. We’ll see how they all develop. The northeast African tuberous species are coming along. Moringa rivae is doing well, making massive tubers that you would never guess are there from the skinny aerial stem. They seem to leaf out twice a year, which is probably what they do in the wild, in concert with the two rainy seasons in the Horn of Africa. This means that they leaf out beautifully at the beginning of the rainy season here, then get ratty, then leaf out again about now, on Africa time. The same goes for M. ruspoliana and M. longituba. I don’t have very many M. borzianas, but they seem happy to grow all the time as long as someone waters them. We’ll have a better idea of everyone’s phenology as the years go by and we have more plants and more experience with them all growing together. Out of the 100 or so plants planted so far, we have only lost 2 plants. Both were very small M. oleifera seedlings planted in marginal locations. So, really, the success rate has been amazing. A lot of plants spend a year or two or even more investing in roots before really taking off. We’ll keep watering through the dry season to see if we can’t force the moringas to get even bigger. That way when the rains return and they start growing in earnest they’ll really be ready to go. If they double in size by next year, which Moringas usually can do, then the whole maintenance level of the collection will start do go down. While they are small, it’s a constant battle against vines and weeds and leafcutter ants. When they are large they just shrug off all of these nuisances. We’ll keep babying them until that time arrives. When not being used for food, oil, forage, medicine, water purification, fiber, or biofuels, moringas are often used as ornamentals. I will look at outdoor uses in another post. This post will look at small moringas as ornamentals in pots grown by people who like to look at tubers, roots, and other sculptural dryland plants. Dryland plants that grow with exposed tubers, or that can be grown with exposed tubers, are often known as caudiciforms or caudex plants, and fat, water-storing trees are known as pachycaul trees. They are both esteemed ornamentals. The most recent shipment of my moringa collections from Africa, Asia, and Madagascar just arrived from Missouri, where they have been under expert care for more than ten years. They will soon be planted out here at the collection and grow into trees or shrubs, and lose some of the charm that they now have. So it's a good time to take a snapshot of what they look like now to show what moringas look like when grown very "hard," that is, with very little water. You will never kill a moringa for lack of water. Keep them dry, only let them grow a few weeks a year, and you will be rewarded with a very fat-based, compact caudiciform. Most of the plants shown below are 10 years old from seed. By far one of the best caudiciform species is our old friend Moringa oleifera. Remember that this species is famous for growing into a 6-8 meter tall tree in a year. If you give it just a little too much water, it will shoot for the sky and you will lose the charming caudiciform shape. Keep them dry, though, and you will be rewarded with almost comical, often almost perfectly shperical fat tubers. Most oleiferas will do this-- the photo below includes street tree M. oleifera from India, from Madagascar, and the cultivar PKM. That M. oleifera is so easy to come by inexpensively, along with its tendency to form wonderful caudiciforms, leads several unscrupulous nurserymen to sell hard-grown oleifera seedlings posing as the rare northeast Africa dwarf species such as M. borziana or M. rivae. These are to my knowledge not in the nursery trade and probably represent M. oleifera. If you have doubts, send me photos and I can try to ID your plants. The pachycaul species Moringa ovalifolia also does well in a pot. It grows as a tuberous herb for many years before forming a permanent stem. This is a good pachycaul tree for a pot because unlike many pachycauls it gets a very fat base in a pot, looking like a miniature version of its wild self. Moringa peregrina, one of the slender trees, is one of the most exotic moringas when grown in a pot. A tree in the wild, it hangs on for years as a caudiciform when grown in a pot, dying back to perfect globby tubers when it gets dry. When watered, it produces blue foliage, unique in the family. Moringa longituba is a coveted species, with its fat tubers and red flowers. The tuber in the wild grows way below ground level and moringas don't like their roots kept warm, so they are not 100% happy with growing with the tuber exposed. They grow quickly enough from seed but as adults get long and rangy if given too much water. So, Moringa offers great material for growing as ornamental caudiciforms in pots. Just be sparing with the water and watch out for M. oleifera masquerading as other species. Happily, M. oleifera, the easiest species to get ahold of, is also one of the best species for culivation as a caudiciform.
In 1997-1998 I was in Toliara (Tuléar), southwestern Madgascar, to collect, among other things, Moringa drouhardii and to look for wild Moringa hildebrandtii. Moringa drouhardii is reasonably common in a variety of settings in southern Madagascar. I saw it growing in dry scrub south of Toliara on bare limestone hillsides, where, at maybe 4-5 meters tall, it was the tallest plant in the area. It also grew in dense tropical dry forest on the steep limestone slopes of the Onilahy River canyon. There the plants were taller, to about 7 meters tall. In southeastern Madagascar it grows in the Berenty area dry forest, which is relatively flat and rolling on deep soil. There the trees were about 6 meters tall. It also grew in the same general area but in the gallery forest at Amboasary along the Mandrare river. This is tall riparian forest on deep alluvial soil with plenty of moisture. There the trees were tall and relatively slender and at least 8 meters tall. In early 1998, all the plants were in flower. Given that Moringa oleifera flowers so quickly in cultivation, about 6 months, I was curious to know how long it takes the other species to get to flowering age. In Toliara town, I saw a Moringa drouhardii planted as an ornamental on the grounds of a hotel. It was in full flower, so I asked the gardener about the plant. He said he had planted the tree as a small seedling four years ago, and that this was the first time that it had flowered. So, four years to flower. I collected seeds of M. drouhardii in southeastern Madagascar and planted them in 1998 for my research. They grew well and the experiments also came out fine. Then the plants remained in pots, some in a greenhouse in Califorina, some in Missouri. There they survived nicely but the cool temperatures and limited root run kept them small, less than a meter tall. I brought them down to Mexico in 2000, and they remained in Mexico City outside in pots. Mexico City is at 2000 meters elevation and with its tropical highland climate it is always cool at night and can even freeze at the height of winter. So, not a good climate for moringas. Moringa oleifera simply refused to grow for me. I lost an M. longituba seedling to the cold, which bothered me considerably. The M. drouhardii, which is one of the species that best tolerates cooler temperatures, though, did hang on, growing a cm or two a year but never more. Finally, in 2010, I planted two individuals here in the coastal lowlands (see post on Moringa drouhardii in the ground). Now, four years later, just like in Toliara, M. drouhardii is in bloom! The four bottle tree Moringa species (M. drouhardii, M. hildebrandtii, M. stenopetala, and M. ovalifolia) have flowers that are very much unlike M. oleifera. Instead of being bilaterally symmetrical when seen from the front, they are more or less radially symmetrical. The flowers of the four bottle tree species are fairly similar. Here are photos of the flowers of M. drouhardii fallen on the ground here in Mexico. They have a powerful jasmine scent that you can smell from several meters away, perfuming the air around the trees. The flowers were perfumed during the day in Madagascar and were visited by bees, and here they are attracting bees and bumblebees as well. Here also is a photo of the flowers of Moringa stenopetala, which began flowering here in May and, with green fruits now developing, still has inflorescences in full flower. Moringa drouhardii and M. stenopetala flowers are distinguished by subtle differences. The easiest difference to see in these photos is that the petals of M. drouhardii have small “claws,” that is, have portions of the petals that are straight before reflexing. Moringa stenopetala petals, instead, are reflexed more or less directly without a claw.
With any luck, we’ll have seed of M. drouhardii soon, the first generation born and bred in the New World, from the seeds collected in Madagascar. After months of gathering my moringa collection, dispersed in Missouri and California, here in Mexico, and growing the plants up to 1-2 meters tall, last week I planted out the first 60 trees in the permanent moringa germplasm site. Different moringa species have different cultural requirements, so the site has a flat area of deep soil and is relatively moist, a shady hollow, and a hot, dry ridge. This combination is perfect for growing all members of the family. I planted out the giant species M. drouhardii and M. hildebrandtii along a shallow drainage in the area of deep soil. This will allow them to reach their full sizes--M. hildebrandtii can grow to 25 meters tall when growing in shady river bottom country, as I have seen along southwestern Madagascar’s Onilahy River. I planted M. concanensis and M. concanensisXoleifera on the drier parts of the flat area, and along about 60 meters of the egde of the property I planted a bunch of different M. oleifera plants to serve as a living fence. On the dry, exposed ridge I planted some M. peregrina and M. ovalifolia to see how they do, but they might require soil amendment because they like very well-drained soil. We’ll see what happens. The shady hollow will be stenopetala gulch. This small drainage has some intact bits of native woods on it, and in the gaps I planted about 20 Moringa stenopetala plants of various provenances, including seedling from trees I collected in the wild on Parmalok Island in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley. Most M. stenopetala plants in cultivation are probably not from wild plants but from cultivated ones in northern central Kenya and southern Ethiopia, where they are grown for food. In the wild, M. stenopetala seems to grow near water, and can get a very massive single trunk. In cultivation, they often grow into giant bushes. I am hoping that growing up among other trees, the ones I just planted will look more like the wild trees, with a single fat trunk. We got water to the site! The municipal water system doesn't reach the site, so we collect water in a cistern and then pump it via a 1hp electric pump to the water tank on the hillside. It's 250 meters and a 30 m elevation difference, so I am very impressed with the pump. The system seems to be working like a charm. Getting water to the site was a major triumph because getting the plants through their first dry season or two is all about water. Once they are established, they won't need any supplemental watering, but to get the plants going there is not botanical garden without water. I’m giving the trees a month to see how they do. The rains have started, which means that the weeds will be growing. Between the weeds and the leafcutter ants, being a small tree in the dry tropics can be daunting. But moringas grow fast and my bet is that in a month’s time, which is when I will evaluate the success or failure of the first planting, the trees will be established and growing at the usual shockingly fast moringa pace.
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AuthorDr. Mark E. Olson is a researcher at Mexico's national university and an expert on the biology of the genus Moringa Archives
November 2018
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