A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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drip tip
A drip tip is the drawn-out point at the end of a leaf, sometimes an inch or more long, that channels water off the surface into a single stream. It is a rainforest feature, near-universal in the wet tropics and largely absent in dry forest, and the same shape has evolved independently in unrelated plant families that share nothing but the climate.
Etymology
The English name is functional and modern, coined by botanists describing tropical forest structure rather than inherited from anyone’s vernacular. It sits alongside a set of terms invented the same way and for the same reason: buttress root, cauliflory for flowers growing straight out of a trunk, and emergent for the trees that stand above the canopy.
Notes
The leading explanation is that shedding water fast keeps the leaf surface dry, and a dry leaf grows fewer of the mosses, lichens, and algae that would otherwise coat it and block its light. Fossil leaves with drip tips are used to identify ancient rainforest in the geological record, since the shape indicates rainfall regardless of what species carried it.