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This valuable, hard, red-brown wood has been logged and exported ever since the Spanish first established a colony here. It is quite rare in most parts, but you can still see plenty of caoba trees, some up to 60-ft (18-m) high, in the Cordillera Central.

The elegant royal palm is found throughout the island. Measuring up to 60 ft (18 m), its graceful appearance is matched by its usefulness. It provides coconuts as well as wood for house building and its leaves can be used for waterproof thatches.

A small evergreen tropical tree with a strange nocturnal love life, the calabash’s flowers bloom only at night, when they are pollinated by bats. The fruits that develop in clusters along the trunk and branches have a hard green wooden shell, which since Taino times has been used as a utensil and ornament.

The only pine widespread in the Caribbean, this tree flourishes at altitudes above 6,500 ft (1,981 m), as on the flanks of Pico Duarte. The dense forests of the interior are filled with their distinctive fresh odor, creating an illusion of the Alps in the tropics.

Ubiquitous along the wilder beaches, this tough shrub looks twisted and stunted but thrives in the inhospitable terrain of sand and salt water. Some grow tall and provide a welcome shade. The so-called grapes, though edible, are extremely sour and taste better when made into a jelly.

Orchids are big business around Jarabacoa and Constanza, where they are grown commercially for the North American market. The beautiful flowers also grow profusely in the wild, especially in the humid climate of the higher reaches of the Parque Nacional Sierra de Baoruco, where there are over 150 species.

A large grouping of eye-catching plants, of which the pineapple is a member, and increasingly popular as exotic indoor ornamentals. Here, they grow wild, either in the ground or sprouting from a tree, shrub, or even from a telegraph post.

The bright red, purple or pink flowers of this spectacular shrub are in fact, large bracts that surround the small and inconspicuous flowers. A great favorite as a garden plant because it flowers for most of the year, it is actually a native of South America and was imported to the Caribbean.

Also a common female name in the Dominican Republic, the mop-headed hortensia is a very popular plant, having been imported from Japan. Such is the quantity of these flowers growing around the central town of Bonao that it is widely known as the Villa de las Hortensias.

One of the many types of spiny plants that cling precariously to life in the parched desert regions around Barahona and Monte Cristi is the opuntia , known among the locals as tuna . It produces pretty flowers on its plump water-retaining pads before the pinkish and very hard-to-handle fruits appear. The inhabitants of the Dominican Republic consider the flesh quite a delicacy.