Treasures

Native Imarel Flora - by T.A. Saunders, B.Kellestine, K.Johnson v3

Crawling Stenchwood Tree

This tree is more like a large vine than a tree, as it tends to grow around anything that is in its environment and reaches for the sun even to the point of twisting around things in its way that sit still long enough to be entangled. The plants don't move quickly, but buildings that get in their way get a nice vine like coating. The tree itself is only five or six inches thick.

The tree has a flowering pod that blooms off of thick branches coming off the main trunk. The flowers are bright yellow at the middle, orange around the edges of the leaves, a center stripe of white at the middle of the four or five petals of the ‘flower' at the center of the flower a fruit grows which until the flower opens the fruit is contained in a sac of sticky puss like liquid. Nothing about this tree smells pleasant. The Flowers don't smell good, the fruit doesn't smell good and the puss of the inside of the flowers is sometimes used to ward off predators by its sheer overpowering nature.

The fruit that grows from this flower is about 12 inches long and 6 inches in diameter. It is between one and seven pounds and a creamy colored fruit with a hard spiny outer shell. If one can mange to get passed the pungent flower and fruit, the shell can be opened and the core of the fruit smells like a mixture of rotted milk and butter. Once the stench of the fruit has been overcome, the meat of it is nutty and has a yogurt like consistency. This tree has no medicinal qualities and but for the fruit's base nutritional value. The tree itself turns and twists so much that it is impossible to use the bark for anything but firewood and when it burns it lets off a terrible aroma. The fruit does have a mild concussive property when it reaches full ripeness. When dropped or thrown the core of it has so much pent up gas that the whole of it will explode all over whoever or whatever it is thrown at, covering them in a gelatinous, custard-like mess of white creamy filling. It is not harmful, but it stinks! (contributed by K. Johnson)