Andean Flora

Rainfall, temperature, and altitude creates in the Andes an astonishing variety of plant life and habitat. Just below the lifeless high rocky peaks and the tongues of glacial moraines, the puna region begins (in Ecuador the corresponding but much dumper high-altitude region is called the paramos). These open, almost tundralike grassy hillsides and plains extend from snowline down to about 12,000 feet ans are dominated by the yellow-beige of ichu grass. This most common and important plant of the puna grows in tussocks sometimes three feet high and a foot thick. Besides being a favorite grazing food for llamas and alpacas, ichu grass is used as roof thatch by the highlanders. Smaller plants such as gentians, valerians, madders, lupines, and violas often grow inside these ichu tussocks. Among the high mountains, valley floors too boggy for ichu are often intermitently carpeted with distichia, a grassy-mossy cushion of vegetation.

This high Andean plateau appears, at first glance, rather barren, a vast landscape of burned yellow. A type of elderberry called the sambucus peruviana, the iochroma grandiflora and other flowers, provide few flashes of color. The tree that constantly attracts the attention in the highland towns is the eucalyptus, fairly recently introduced to the Andes.

Since more and more of the Andean countryside is coming under cultivation, some of the most common crops in the highlands are barley, alfalfa, corn, beans, sweet potatoes, yuca, peppers, tomatoes, and the ubiquitous potato. Called pusasuaylla in Quechua, the potato was first domesticated in the Andes, and it woul be more accurate, therefore, to call the Irish Potato the Peruvian Potato.

Descinding from the high cordilleras (mountain ranges) along eastern slope of the Andes, begins the cluod forest, a wonderfully green and misty region. This large ecological system, part of which is called the ceja de montana (eyebrow of the jungle), extends from about 11,000 to 3,000 feet. Created by condensation resulting from the collision of warm moist air rising from the Amazon basin with the cold dry mountain air, the cloud forests are seldom free of rain, clouds, and fog. In this wet climate, plant life flourishes, and a list of typical cloud forest vegetation reads like the inventory of a tropical plant store: fens, orchids, bromeliads, montera, philodendron, diffenbachia, xanthosoma. The largest plants in this region are the South American conifers such as the podocarpus utilor and the podocarpus glomeratus.

Finally, the plant that outsiders most associate with the Andes is, of course, the erythroxylon coca, domisticated since long before the Incas. It grows in the ceja de montana at elevations up to 8,000 feet. Economically important now because it is the row material for cocaine, the coca plant has been considered sacred by Andeans for centuries.

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