Chile 4 - The Valdivian Rain Forest

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I have covered Central Chile in the last two blogs. Although we were travelling south, the growing conditions were pretty much the same and many of the plants were seen every day. Now we come to a change. We reached the city of Puerto Montt (which is one and a half hour’s flying time from Santiago). The climate here is very damp; the nearby forests get more than 260 days of rain a year so we expected to see some new plants and we were not disappointed.

Firstly, I will give you an idea of what the woodland looks like – you will notice it is not raining!

Ferns and mosses are everywhere

including blechnum chilense

The giant gunnera manicata comes from Brazil; here you find the slightly smaller gunnera tinctoria

There are only two members of the crinodendron family and they both come from Chile. These are the flowers on the more familiar one, crinodendron hookerianum, the lantern tree

Another familiar plant was the climber, solanum crispum, scrambling some twenty feet or more into the trees

Less familiar is luzuriaga radicans, available from a few specialist nurseries in this country. Here it is, revelling in the damp, shady conditions

Another plant that is very much at home here is asteranthera ovata. This is a creeping or clambering evergreen shrub, even shinning up trees.

Another shrub, unique to this area, is mitraria coccinea. This will also clamber if given a helping hand, or make a free-standing shrub up to six feet tall

The one plant I really wanted to see in flower on this trip was philesia magellanica. This makes a suckering shrub about three feet high and up to six feet across. Twice I have tried to grow it so I wanted to see it in its natural habitat. Here, we found it growing very happily

From here, we left mainland Chile and flew to Patagona but in the next blog, I will show you some of the orchids we saw.

To be continued…

• 14 Jan, 2011
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