This tree in Corrientes prompted me to write this post. I knew it as a “Palo borracho” or drunken stick and I have seen them in Zimbabwe as well as in Latin America. I thought that all of them belonged to the same genus, Bombax. This is not so!

Bombax spp. are native of western Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and the subtropical regions of East Asia and northern Australia while the ones we get in South America belong to the Ceiba genus and they are native of the tropical and subtropical forsts of that continent..

Bombax ceiba, like other trees of the genus Bombax, is commonly known as cotton tree. More specifically, it is sometimes known as Malabar silk-cotton tree; red silk-cotton; red cotton tree; or ambiguously as silk-cotton or kapok. These trees have straight tall trunks and red  flowers with five petals that will produce a capsule which, when ripe, contains white fibres like cotton. Its trunk bears spikes to deter attacks by animals.

We have seen examples of what I now know are Ceiba spp. in Salta, Chaco, and Corrientes provinces of Argentina and they are rather special with their swollen trunks looking like bottles!

Above are pictures taken many years back of one of these trees that we found at the main square of Resistencia, the capital of Chaco Province.

Apart from “palo borracho”, the better known, Ceiba speciosa, is known as the floss silk tree in the USA is for “samu’ũ” (in Guarani), “paineira” (in Brazilian Portuguese), “toborochi” in Bolivia. It belongs to the same family as the baobab and the kapok.

Spot the beast

Now that you are familiar with the “palo borracho”, perhaps it may be easy for you to spot the beast in the picture?

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