It Would Puzzle A Monkey

The Garden’s South American Area occupies nearly two acres. Here you will find beautiful flowers, rare plants, and several of the unusual monkey puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana). This collection displays members of the temperate and Mediterranean-climate areas of South America, featuring plants from the matorral (Spanish for shrublands or thickets of bushes) of coastal Chile. The environmental conditions that support the matorral are comparable to those in California, where similar-looking chaparral plant communities thrive.

The Garden’s small grove of monkey puzzle trees (Araucaria araucana) were grown from seed collected in Chile’s Parque Nacional Nahuelbuta in 1983 by former Garden director Dr. Robert Ornduff. The trees are hard to miss with their intricate, scaly branches and trunk. Mature trees can grow up to 30 meters (160 ft) tall, and ultimately shed their lower branches, revealing a thick trunk topped by an umbrella-shaped canopy. They can live for over 1,000 years, taking up to twenty years to produce seeds.

Monkey puzzle trees became a favorite of garden designers in the Victorian period. According to one story about the origin of the tree’s name, the proud owner of a young specimen was showing it to friends, when one of them remarked that even a monkey would puzzle on how to climb it. As the species had no existing English common name, it was first called “monkey puzzler” and then “monkey puzzle.”

Find the grove in the South America Collection, bed 657.