Royal Poinciana Delonix regia
Family: Fabaceae •
Genus: Delonix •
Species: regia (Bojer ex Hook.) Raf. •
Country of Origin: Madagascar •
Common Names: Royal Poinciana, Flamboyant Tree, Flame Tree, Peacock Flower, Flamboyan, Flor de matrim, Gulmohur [thanks Sunita] •
This is another one of my favorite tropical flowering trees. You can always tell when summer is here because the Royal Poinciana's will be blooming. These trees have a sprawling bonsai feel to them. The orange/red flowers are very complex from close-up as you can see. When you have a high vantage point. You can see blotches of orange/red all over in the sea of green trees.
Royal Poinciana grows to 9 - 15 m in height but its elegant, wide-spreading, umbrella-like canopy can be even wider. Royal Poinciana is deciduous in climates that have a marked dry season, but in tropical areas where the winter is not that much dryer than the summer, it is a semi-evergreen tree.
The leaves are feather-like, twice-pinnate, and 30.5-50.8 cm long with 11-25 pairs of primary leaflets (pinnae), each divided into 10-25 pairs of secondary leaflets (pinules). The flame-colored flowers are formed in dense clusters and bloom seasonally, usually in midsummer. Th individual flowers are between 8 and 15 cm in diamerter and have four spoon shaped spreading scarlet or orange-red petals (4-7 cm long) and one upright slightly larger petal (the standard) which is marked with yellow and white. The dark brown pods are flat and woody, up to 70 cm long and 7 cm wide. They contain between 18-45 yellowish to dark brown seeds that are about 2 cm long.(Wagner, W.L., D.R. Herbst and S.H. Sohmer. 1999. Manual of the Flowering Plants of Hawai'i.)
(Smith, A. C. 1985. Flora Vitiensis Nova)
from
Royal Poinciana
Had to add this amazing photo
original photo by
Flamboyant vermelho - Flávio Cruvinel Brandão on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
Royal Poinciana by Eric Bronson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.flickr.com