Silk Cotton Tree

Le Silk Cotton ou Ceiba Tree [Ceiba pentandra (L.) Gaertn.] Est l’un des ....

The Silk Cotton or Ceiba Tree [Ceiba pentandra (L.) Gaertn.] is one of the largest trees in the American tropics. The tree has played an important role in the spiritual and economic lives of the peoples who live in the circum-Caribbean region.

The Ceiba is a rapidly growing deciduous tree that reaches heights of 80 feet or more, and a diameter of five to eight feet above its buttresses. The buttresses themselves can be up to ten feet tall and extend ten feet from the main trunk. The tree has a broad, flat crown of horizontal branches. The leaves are compound with five to eight lance-shaped leaflets that are three to eight inches long. From December to February the tree produces numerous five-part whitish to pink flowers which occur in dense clusters and bloom before the leaves appear.

The tree produces three-to-six-inch long, elliptical fruits. These fruits contain many seeds surrounded by a dense mat of cottony fibers. The tree gets its common name from these fibers which rain from the tree when the fruits ripen. The fibers are almost pure cellulose, buoyant, impervious to water, and have a low thermal conductivity, but they do not lend themselves to spinning. Called Kapok in Asia, the fibers are used for insulation, padding in sleeping bags and life preservers, and for stuffing mattresses and pillows. In Puerto Rico the tree was often planted in the center of plazas for shade, and it is considered a valuable honey tree.

The tree in these photographs is growing on the Sweetwater archaeological site, Paradise Park, Westmoreland, Jamaica. All around the base of the tree there are broken pieces of pottery, shells, and stone from a Taino village that was occupied during the 15th to 16th centuries. Bill Rogers, a forester from Tallahassee, Florida, examined the tree while volunteering on an archaeological research project.

Bill concluded that the tree was now about 85 feet tall, although it had been topped (the top had broken off in a storm sometime in the past). Furthermore, the tree was about 8 feet in diameter above the buttresses, and we measured the width of the tree with buttresses as more than 20 feet at ground level. Bill estimated that the tree is 200 to 300 years old. While working at the site in 2002, a local volunteer noticed that the tree appeared to be smoking. Part of the mythical qualities associated with these trees?