The Maya Breadnut of Flamingo Gardens

Archaeologists have argued for decades over whether this tree helped keep Maya cities fed through droughts that failed their corn. Brosimum alicastrum produces a starchy, protein-rich seed the Maya ground into flour and ate roasted, and the species turns up in unusually dense stands around ancient Maya ruin sites across the Yucatan and the Peten, dense enough that some researchers think the trees were deliberately planted or favoured by people managing the forest around their cities centuries ago. Others argue the pattern is simply what the tree does naturally on the disturbed, phosphorus-rich ground people happened to leave behind. The debate has not settled either way. The specimen at Flamingo Gardens in Davie has grown over three metres round the trunk and above twenty metres tall, standing in the picnic area of the sixty-acre garden, and the Florida Forest Service records it as the state's Champion Brosimum alicastrum, the largest of its species measured in Florida. Local names for the tree, ramon and breadnut, both point at the same use: the seed, not the fruit around it, was the food. No planting date survives for this individual, so its age is unrecorded. What survives instead is the size of the trunk, the largest example of a tree that may or may not have helped feed an empire, standing now beside a garden's picnic tables.