The Sumaúma of Tom Jobim

Antônio Carlos Jobim walked in this garden most mornings and stopped in front of this kapok. The staff have called it a árvore de Tom ever since, Tom's tree. In January 1995, a year after his death, IBAMA set a plaque at its foot addressing him as maestro soberano, and the columnist Antonio Callado wrote the whole thing up in the Folha de São Paulo that week. The tree stands 40.01 metres tall, one of the specimens the Jardim Botânico put on its Trilha das Árvores Gigantes when the Giant Trees Trail opened in September 2022. Ceiba pentandra is the sumaúma, the tree that holds the top of the canopy across the Amazon and up into Central America, buttressed at the base the way rainforest giants are. Nobody has dated it. The species is credited with lives well past a century and heights near seventy metres, but that is the species rather than this individual, and there is no ring count, no planting record and no published estimate for this trunk. So the honest answer is that we do not know how old Tom's tree is, and somebody at the garden probably does. It was standing and photographed as recently as November 2024, when Ashley Biden posed in front of it during the G20 and the picture ran widely.