Photos

Three views of the Drago tree, the symbolic tree of the Canaries islands, taken in a botanical garden in La Orotava. The sky was unfortunatly just a grey mass at that time, wihch explains the UGGLY background, but since the interest here is the tree, I have decided to post them anyway...

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Dracaena draco

Conservation status
Vulnerable (IUCN 2.3)
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Plantae
(unranked): Angiosperms
(unranked): Monocots
Order: Asparagales
Family: Ruscaceae (Dracaenaceae)
Genus: Dracaena
Species: D. draco
Binomial name
Dracaena draco
(L.) L.
Dracaena draco, the Canary Islands Dragon Tree or Drago is a subtropical Dragon Tree native to the Canary Islands, Cape Verde, Madeira, Azores, and locally in western Morocco.

The tree is characterised by a single or multiple trunk growing up to 12 m tall (rarely more), with a dense umbrella-shaped canopy of thick leaves. It grows slowly, requiring about ten years to reach 1 m tall. Young trees remain with only a single stem; branching occurs when the tree flowers, when two side shoots at the base of the flower panicle continue the growth as a fork in the stem. Being monocotyledonous, Dracaena draco does not display annual rings and age can only be estimated by the number of branch forking occurrences (indicating the number of flowering episodes) and measuring the frequency of flowering (less than annual). Some specimens are believed to be up to 650 years old; the oldest is growing at Icod de los Vinos in northwest Tenerife.

The recently discovered wild populations in western Morocco have been described as a separate subspecies, Dracaena draco subsp. ajgal, while those on Gran Canaria are sometimes distinguished as a separate species Dracaena tamaranae.

When the bark or leaves are cut it secretes a reddish resin, one of the sources of the substance known as Dragon's blood.