The garden has put up a sign beside this tree warning visitors about falling cannonballs, and it is not a joke.
Cannon Ball Tree
Couroupita guianensis
Couroupita guianensis grows its fruit and flowers straight out of the trunk rather than the branches, a habit botanists call cauliflory and gardens call a hazard: ripe cannonball-sized fruit falls from height and splits open with a smell that carries, and Honolulu's Foster Garden has posted a sign warning visitors under its specimen. We map 3 of them, in 2 cities.
Three trees on this site share the trick. Singapore's, in the Ginger Garden, grew from seed E.J.H. Corner carried aboard ship in 1931 during an eight-hour stop in Ceylon. Its flowers make no nectar; the sterile pollen at their centre exists only to bring carpenter bees in for the fertile kind elsewhere on the bloom. Oahu's second specimen, on the UH Manoa campus, carries a trunk 314 centimetres round and an unconfirmed campus legend that the playwright Thornton Wilder planted it in 1933. All three flower and fruit from bark most trees keep bare.
Oahu
Its flowers grow straight out of the trunk, and so, eventually, does fruit the size of cannonballs.
Singapore
This tree flowers and fruits straight out of its own trunk.
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