Pink Saturday - Silk Floss Tree

Beverly at the blog How Sweet the Sound has a great idea! It's Pink Saturday. Post about something pink, on Saturday. Here are the rules if you want to Get Pink!

Southern California's mild climate has allowed landscape designers and gardeners to experiment with plants from all over the world, and the ones that have adapted successfully have become much-loved favorites of urban planning.

San Vicente Boulevard in Santa Monica and Brentwood is known for its broad grassy median planted with huge specimens of Coral Trees, native trees from South Africa. Other sections of town have streets lined with jacaranda trees, with blooms of blue-violet in May and June - famous for being both beautiful and maddeningly messy. In some locations, huge single specimens of Moreton Bay Figs, native of Australia have thrived and spread like giants to become landmarks on their own.

I was in Glendale the other day, and noticed street trees with huge hibiscus-like blossoms of gorgeous pink growing near the Glendale Civic Auditorium.

The petals were large and droopy, the leaves floppy, and the trees had an overall loose, sketchy beauty that made me curious what they were.

The botanical name is Ceiba speciosa - formerly known as Chorisia speciosa. The common name is Silk Floss Tree. It's a deciduous tree native to South America, growing in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil.

It's a great tree for urban planting, as it's drought tolerant. It will grow quickly if water is available, but can survive when water is scarce. In young trees, the truck and branches are green with chlorophyll, making it able to synthesize nutrients even when its leaves have fallen.

In its native land, it is sometimes known as Palo boraccho - the drunken tree. I couldn't find a story about how it got that name.

In addition to beautiful flowers, it has a wickedly stout thorns on its trunk and branches - making it, again, a useful plant for urban gardens - or for Sleeping Beauty's thorn-entangled tower.

In South America, migrating monarch butterflies are drawn to the hibiscus-like flowers. I can only imagine how stunning it would be to see these showy flowers surrounded by butterflies! Plantings of the Silk Floss Tree in the L.A. County Arboretum and Huntington Gardens attract flocks of feral parakeets that depend on its fruit pods for a source of food.

Like its relative the kapok tree, or Ceiba pentandra, the Silk Floss Tree's seed pods are full of fluff - hence its common name. Here's a picture of the seed pods, and instructions if you want to grow a Silk Floss Tree yourself.