Red Silk-Cotton Tree

(Sometimes called “Kapok,” but see also Ceiba pentandra)

Bombax ceiba L.

BOMB-backs SAY-buh

Bombacaceae

Explanation of name: Bombax is Latin for cotton. Ceiba is an ancient name. (BA1)

Natural range: Tropical Asia and probably Australia, ancient cultivation obscures precise origins.

Recognition: Potentially large, deciduous, spiny-trunked tree having palmately compound leaves and large bowl-shaped red flowers with 5 broad, reflexed petals and numerous stamens, the flowers produced while the tree is bare. Fruits woody, filled with cottony silk. ‘Orange Glow’ has orangish flowers light-colored at the centers.

            Differs from Silk Floss (Chorisia speciosa) by having red flowers with the petals almost as broad as long, as opposed to the petals pinkish (yellow basally on the inside) and much longer than wide.

            Baobab (Adansonia digitata L.) differs from the Silk Floss and from the Red Silk-Cotton Tree by having smooth (not spiny) trunks, the leaves fuzzy beneath, and the flowers white (stamens sometimes purplish according to BA1), and by having the stamens joined into a tube for half their length; the flowers dangling on long pedicels.

Landscape uses: Large novelty specimen tree for sunny dry place

Internet source: http://www.bio.miami.edu/arboretum/Redsilkcottontree.html.