Some of the all-time great tropical flowering trees have got to be chorisias. How can you not love trees with pink and white flowers and lizard green bark which bloom immodestly on bare limbs? But like all immodest issues it is sometimes quite another thing to pry into personal history.

Anyone who does not take name tags for granted and who really looks closely at the flowers of plants labeled Chorisia speciosa will come away scratching their head. If we are to assume that plants receive their scientific names mostly by way of distinguishing floral characteristics you will also soon wonder why there is little consistency among cultivated plants that go by that name.

So take a close look at Chorisias cultivated around town and note the stamens, if they are fused or free, and the color of the little ring of staminodes (sterile stamens), or corona, at the base of the stamens in the center of the flower. You will find a lot of plants with some brightly colored and or fuzzy staminodes and others that are white and hairless. Note the markings on the petals as well, their relative width and if the petals are smooth or have wavy margins, are vase-like or spreading or covered with silky hairs. See if the bark is tan or green, green-striped or just green on the new growth.

One tree in Fairchild Tropical Garden which was wild collected, seems particularly odd. The flowers might go unnoticed because they are high up and mostly white, only slightly streaked with purple-pink. The petals are smooth and obovate (oval with the broadest part away from the center). But check the fallen flowers. Some stamens are fused in a column like an hibiscus and others are completely free or anywhere in between! This gives taxonomists fits. You see nature is not orderly and there are few perfect examples but rather an array. Taxonomists are orderly to the extreme. They come unglued when nature refuses to behave.

Enter yours truly, someone who likes this detective game and needs to put the correct name on a photo in case some really cleaver person will come along and point out that the names and photos don’t match. This can get you in some pretty hot water in the middle of a presentation. So for a long time I have quizzed just about everyone in the tropical tree society, botanists and plant fanciers of every sort. But the bombax family more often than not gets a shrug of the shoulders.

Well, luckily I have met someone who has given me a lot more satisfying answers than the musty old reference library, -give praise to e-mail. Dr. Peter Gibbs is a Bombacaceae specialist at The University at St. Andrews in Scotland. (Don’t ask me why somebody in Scotland is studying Chorisia instead of heath plants unless it is a sly way to get to travel to the tropics!).Peter had been working on revising Ceiba which includes the Chorisia group. (Ceiba and Chorisia differ mainly in that Chorisia has one ring of stamens with a second ring reduced to a corona, Ceiba has 2 rings of fertile stamens). He is currently distracted by a really dubious-sounding genetic condition found in ceiba/chorisia called "slow-acting SI/ovarian sterility", but he was delighted that someone took interest in his research and offered me a wealth of information on Chorisia species.

I sent Peter several scans of the perplexing variations I was finding around Miami which he found quite intriguing – since he is used to working with pickled specimens (chorisia flowers don’t flatten very well in the herbarium)! He says that he has "never satisfactorily resolved the mess which he calls the Chorisia insignis – but prefers Ceiba insignis - group, a matter of determining which of the variable group is a species, sub-species or race. This group "extends in a horseshoe shape from the Brazilian states of Ceará and Bahia, down through Minas Gerais, Rio, Sao Paulo and Mato Grosso Sul to northern Argentina, [eastern Andean watershed of] Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador". He reminds us that the species have been cultivated for their beauty and for the production of kapok for centuries and that "one rarely finds a ‘native’ plant left in the devastated forests. All of the group are inter-fertile" and the seed is highly wind and water transportable. This infers that even seemingly wild grown plants may be hybrids within the group.

He continues: "As one extends into Rio state, C. crispiflora appears which only seems to differ [from C. speciosa] in narrower, undulate petals. As one travels upstate in Sao Paulo and into Goias and Mato Grosso, the flowers are often smaller, uniformly pink and the staminal filaments are more consistently divided [!!] as far as the corona of the staminode. This is C. pubiflora which I think is a mere subspecies at most. Confusingly, typical "speciosa-type" plants re-appear in parts of Bolivia".

Additional tips to distinguish the groups: C. crispiflora has undulate margined narrow, acuminate (tapering to a point) petals and purple corona which is covered with fuzzy white hairs. (See the large tree at Montgomery near the research center which is C. crispiflora ‘LASCA Beauty’) C. speciosa has smooth margined, obovate petals which are solid pink, half to 2/3 from the petal tips and white with red stripes/spots near the center. The corona is hairless, white. C. pubiflora (or C. speciosa ssp pubiflora) is white to pale pink with pink stripes/spots running the full length of the petals with a pink to red corona, margins not undulate. The stamens are often free (not in a column). (FTG has a young specimen in the Pseudobombax plot and there are a couple hanging over the fence at 4-Fillies Farm). Note: it is more correct and informative to use "C. speciosa type" or the botanical "aff. (affinity for) C. speciosa", etc. when describing species which are in cultivation and cannot be positively identified.

Peter says that some time back an Argentine scientist incorrectly referred to the native yellow-flowered chorisias as C. insignis. This has caused great confusion in the literature also giving rise to a common name of yellow-silk floss tree or yellow-flowered Chorisia for C. insignis which is, in fact white. In the strictest sense Chorisia insignis comes only from northern Peru and Ecuador. The Argentine species is C. chodatii and has narrower, lax, glossy light yellow flowers with a vase shape which is referred to as lily-like. (The tree on Sunset in South Miami is C. chodatii). The more commonly cultivated and true C. insignis is white with silky hairs on expanded petals. It becomes necrotic around the center as it ages giving a brownish appearance.

Clarifying hybrids in cultivation: At the Kampong a cross was made between species of uncertain background. One parent has been referred to as Rhodognaphalon, an African species, which was presumably obtained from FTG by Crafton Clift though no longer growing in either place and for which there is no record. It is possible that the plant might have been confused with Rhodognapalopsis (now Pachira insignis) of which there is one at the Kampong and several at FTG (Looks like a more slender-flowered, white Pseudobombax flower but the leaflets are articulated – unarticulated leaflets are a distinguishing feature of Pseudobombax). However there are no off-spring known to me with characteristics indicating any intergeneric cross.

The more significant crosses are those made on a tree brought in by Roberto Burli-Marx from the Rio area, which goes by the name ‘Sugar Loaf’ at the Kampong, and has hot pink flowers, a possible variation or hybrid of the C. crispiflora type. The other parent is C. chodatii. Willis Harding grew a large number of the seedlings and planted many in his local park in Broward which have produced a wide spectrum of dramatically colored, unusually large-flowered offspring with characteristics of C. crispiflora and C. publiflora to widely varying degrees among the offspring. Willis also has an unusually large, white flowered chorisia that does not appear to be a typical C. insignis which is said to show the variations of the column seen in C. pubiflora.

Of interest is the legend behind the C. chodatii in South Miami, the Argentine species, said to have been collected in western Africa in the 1940s though there is only word-of-mouth history for this plant. Many species were imported to Africa over several centuries for the Kapok industry and in all probability this plant - or its ancestors - originated in South America whether by way or Africa or not. This tree was sometimes referred to as Rhodognaphalon because of its African origin which may be another explanation for the previously mentioned confusion. Rhodognaphalon has stamens in 2 rings like Bombax spp (unlike Chorisia spp where one ring is reduced to the sterile corona) which quickly eliminates it as a possible identification. Dr. Gibbs says that this species will possibly be renamed Ceiba chodatii or a sub-species of Ceiba insignis. But until he or his Brazilian partner get to work on the group we can still safely continue to use the name Chorisia.

The other bombacaceous plant that is especially curious in our area is the Ceiba pentandra that Lester Pancoast brought back from cultivation in Madagascar. It is now circulating in the trade and is frequently cultivated in Miami including the shopping center on US #1 in Pinecrest in front of "Wild Oats" . It is distinguished by its smooth "lizard-green" bark and nondescript ivory flowers which are hardly noticeable high against the sky in winter. It grows at a fierce rate but is brittle in the wind – suggesting it should not be planted anywhere near the homestead or power lines.

In Mexico C. pentandra has, and has been depicted on spiky Mayan pots since pre-Colombian times, large spines on a brown trunk. The Mexican form has ruddy-pink flowers in large clusters (see Tropica). But what of Lester’s Madagascar import? Certainly it could have been distributed through cultivation to west Africa and thence to Madagascar for cultivation of kapok. But vegetatively it is quite different from the Mexican and South American form. In the Flora of West Tropical Africa, the author, Hutchinson, scorns the notion that Ceiba is only Neotropical saying that in the last century the landscape was replete with huge stands of elderly Ceibas as far as the eye could see. The jury is still out, but Dr. Gibbs is open to the possibility that Ceiba spp may have crossed the Atlantic prehistorically to Africa by air or water currents. Our smooth bark ceiba could, therefore, be a different species or a variety that developed in isolation.

Just for fun, it occurred to me to look up the origin of bombast when I was looking for a fetching title to this article. My dictionary says it comes from the old French and late Latin meaning cotton or silk padding. Pompous kapok anyone.