The Bottle Tree of the Botanic Garden

Break open one of this tree's seed pods and you get a handful of pillow stuffing. The green capsules of Ceiba speciosa split to release a mass of white floss, light and water repellent, which was collected to stuff pillows and mattresses and to insulate against heat and cold. That is why Valencia knows the species as the arbol de la lana, the wool tree, alongside the older local name choricia. Everything else about it is built to stop you touching it. The trunk swells into a barrel and narrows again above, the bark is smooth, greenish and finely striated because it photosynthesises, and the lower stem is studded with hard conical thorns. The species comes from the seasonally dry forests of South America, drops its leaves and grows fast, which is how a tree with no planting record has reached 5.03 metres around and 32.1 metres tall. Of the trees the regional register measures in this garden, only the Caucasian Elm a short walk away carries a thicker trunk. Nobody has dated it. The register takes its measurements and stops, and the garden's own writers describe the species without giving this specimen a year. If you know when it went in, tell us. It stands inside the university's botanic garden, behind a small entrance fee that also covers the Kashmir Cypress and the Caucasian Elm.