Red Silk Cotton Tree

Did you know

• When the bombax blooms in the Indian dry season, it loses every leaf and stands like a giant burning candelabra—each flower as big as a fist, fiery red against bare gray branches.
• It is the official city flower of Kaohsiung, Taiwan and Guangzhou, China—where the bombax 'sky-burning' is a major spring tourist attraction every February.
• The fluffy fiber from the seed pods (kapok) was once the world's standard stuffing for life jackets, mattresses, and pillows because it's incredibly buoyant and water-resistant.
• Sacred to multiple Asian religions—the tree appears in the Mahabharata, where Bhishma describes a heaven full of bombax trees, and is planted at Buddhist temples across Southeast Asia.
• The fallen flowers are eaten as a vegetable in Cambodian, Burmese, and Northern Indian cooking—dried and reconstituted in soups, where they have a slightly mucilaginous, mushroom-like texture.

Color meanings

Uses

• Specimen tree
• Avenue planting
• Sacred trees
• Tropical landscaping