Fort Lauderdale's own downtown holds little worth this list, but twenty minutes inland in Davie, Flamingo Gardens has quietly become the densest concentration of state-record trees anywhere in Florida: more than twenty species that the Florida Forest Service has measured as the biggest of their kind in the state, planted since the botanical collection began on the Wray family's homestead in 1927. Four stand out here, an earpod tree wider than most cars are long, a sandbox tree that detonates its own seed pods, El Salvador's national tree in bloom, and the Maya's staple breadnut.
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The Earpod Tree of Flamingo Gardens
Earpod Tree (Enterolobium cyclocarpum) · Davie
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.
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The Dynamite Tree of Flamingo Gardens
Sandbox Tree (Hura crepitans) · Davie
A ripe sandbox tree pod detonates on its own, no touch required, throwing its seeds up to thirty metres and cracking loud enough to startle anyone standing nearby, which is how the tree earned its other common name, the dynamite tree. This one has grown to over four metres round the trunk and above thirty metres tall, standing on the west side of the children's garden at Flamingo Gardens in Davie, and the Florida Forest Service records it as the state's Champion Hura crepitans, the largest of its species measured anywhere in Florida.
The trunk carries a second warning most visitors notice before any pod goes off: rows of short conical spines cover the bark from base to crown, a defence against animals that might otherwise climb or gnaw it. The pale sap running beneath that bark is caustic enough that people in parts of its native range once used the crushed bark and seeds to stun fish in still water, which is thought to be where the genus name Hura comes from.
None of this makes the tree unusual for a botanical garden; sandbox trees are planted worldwide as ornamentals for their glossy leaves and sheer bulk, sap and spines included. No planting date survives for this specimen, so its age is unrecorded. What is on record is the girth, wider than most sandbox trees anywhere in the state get to grow.
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The Maquilishuat of Flamingo Gardens
Pink Trumpet Tree (Tabebuia rosea) · Davie
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.
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The Maya Breadnut of Flamingo Gardens
Breadnut (Brosimum alicastrum) · Davie
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.
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