The Earpod Tree of Flamingo Gardens

An earpod tree's seed pods curl into something that looks unmistakably like a human ear, dark brown and coiled, which is where the genus name comes from, Enterolobium, roughly "intestine pod," and where Costa Ricans got the tree's other common name, guanacaste. This one has grown wide rather than tall: over six metres round the trunk, spreading into one of the broadest canopies at Flamingo Gardens, a private botanical garden and wildlife sanctuary in Davie. The Florida Forest Service lists it as the state's Champion Enterolobium cyclocarpum, the biggest recorded specimen of the species anywhere in Florida. Guanacaste trees are native to the tropical dry forests of Central America and northern South America, from Mexico to Venezuela, where a single hollowed trunk was traditionally large enough to carve into a dugout canoe. Costa Rica made the species its national tree in 1959, honouring the province of the same name. This one has had none of that use. It has simply been left to grow since the garden's early decades, in the collection assembled around the 1927 homestead of the Wray family, who later opened the grounds to the public. No planting date survives for it specifically, so its age is unrecorded rather than estimated. What is measured is the trunk, wider than most cars are long, standing in a garden that holds more Florida state champion trees in one place than anywhere else in the state.