MAITEN  MAYTENUS BOARIAL

The Maitén is a tree native to extratropical South America.

It is an evergreen, elegant tree that reaches 20 meters in height. It has thin branches, wide crown, straight trunk.

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Its leaves are small, simple, alternate, elliptic, with a fine serrated edge, light green, between 2.5 and 5 cm long, provided with a short petiole. The flowers are small; the male ones are yellow-brown and the female ones are green with purple lines. In the same tree there can be female, male or hermaphrodite flowers. They bloom from mid-November to January.

The fruit is a bivalve yellow capsule, which contains one or two seeds, and is covered by a red membrane. Its seeds have great power of dissemination. It grows on fertile land, requires abundant moisture and is slow growing. It is usually used as firewood, to produce charcoal, and as feed for livestock from which its name comes (bogaría meaning "related to livestock" in Latin), because animals seek its leaves to eat.

The flowers combined with introduced European bees produce delicious honey. Despite its moisture requirements, the maitén is almost always the first of the trees to be found on the eastern edge of the Andean-Patagonian forests, where the ecotone with the steppes of the Patagonian Plateau occurs. Being always found in humid environments, it is believed that they are indicators of water tables or currents when they are associated with the radal.