Tears of the monkey puzzle

There's a monkey puzzle tree I regularly pass on one of the dog walking routes. and I often stop to examine its corrugated bark. Here and there gobbets of resin have drizzled  down the trunk (extra)  I wondered if it had any special properties and when I looked it up found that indeed monkey puzzle resin is reputed to heal wounds and ulcers.

I also learnt that the genus Araucaria to which monkey puzzles belong includes the earliest trees that date back to the Jurassic age and it was their sticky sap, compressed and preserved across the millions of years,  that became the hard resinous material known as  amber. As it trickled down the bark of those ancient trees  insects and spiders sometimes became stuck to it and were preserved intact within it.

It's a sad fact that monkey puzzle trees have become rare in their native region, now known as Chile, where its nuts were once the staple food of the indigenous people. It's a very long lived species but logging and land clearance have endangered its survival. Well might we weep resinous tears along with this and all the other monkey puzzle trees.