The Foster Garden Cannonball Tree

The garden has put up a sign beside this tree warning visitors about falling cannonballs, and it is not a joke. Couroupita guianensis grows its fruit straight out of the trunk rather than from the branches, woody spheres somewhere between a grapefruit and a shot put, hanging on thick stalks that push out of the bark itself. Botanists call the habit cauliflory. Gravity calls it a hazard. A ripe one comes down from height and splits open with a smell that carries. The flowers work the same way and are the reason to come: waxy, orange and pink, each one a shell-shaped hood over a dense spray of stamens, opening in ropes down the trunk at eye level while the crown sails on 29 metres above. It is a South American tree, from the Amazon and the Guianas, soft-wooded and fast, and the city's Exceptional Trees register rates this specimen's condition excellent. It is the most straightforwardly strange thing in a garden that is not short of competition. One thing about it is missing: nobody has recorded when it went into the ground. If you know the planting date, or know someone at the garden who does, tell us and it goes on the page.