The Maquilishuat of Flamingo Gardens

Once a year this tree drops every leaf and turns entirely pink for a week or two, then leafs out green again as if nothing happened. Tabebuia rosea flowers on bare branches between February and April across its native range from Mexico to Peru, a bloom so complete that the whole canopy briefly reads as a single flower rather than a tree. The specimen at Flamingo Gardens in Davie stands close to twenty metres tall with a trunk nearly two and a half metres round, and the Florida Forest Service lists it as the state's Champion Tabebuia rosea, the largest recorded in Florida. El Salvador made this exact species its national tree, calling it the maquilishuat, and across Central America it is planted as a street and park tree specifically for this one performance: an unremarkable green canopy most of the year, then, briefly, impossible to miss. Flamingo Gardens keeps this one among a wider collection of more than twenty Florida Champion trees spread across sixty acres, gathered around a hammock of old live oaks at the heart of the property. No planting record survives for this individual tree, so its age is unrecorded rather than estimated; a tree like this can put on real girth within a few decades, so size alone says little about its years. What is documented is the state record it holds, and the week or two each year, usually late winter into spring, when it is the loudest thing in the garden.