The False Kapok of the Botanical Garden

Naples has 53 entries on Italy's national monumental register and this one has the widest trunk of the lot. What you actually walk up to is not the single swollen bottle the species is famous for. It is four or five enormous stems rising together out of one fused base, smooth and grey-green, leaning gently apart like a hand opening. The 880 centimetres the national register records is a measurement taken around the whole of that base; Campania's regional register says 800. Either figure wins. Ceiba speciosa comes from Brazil, Peru and Argentina, a relative of the kapok whose pods split open into silky white floss. Young trees arm themselves with fat conical spines and shed most of them as the bark stretches, which is why this one is smooth everywhere you can reach. The leaves repay a look as well: five to seven pointed leaflets spreading from one stalk like fingers. Come in October or November. The crown fills with big five-petalled flowers, pink at the tips and streaked yellow towards the throat, and since the leaves are going at roughly the same time the flowers end up sitting on bare wood. They drop in quantity, so the grass underneath turns pink well before the tree above has finished. It has stood here more than a century, through the years the Allies used this garden as a barracks, a car park and a football pitch.