PlantFiles: Popcorn Cassia, Peanut Butter Cassia
Senna didymobotrya

A friend bought this beautiful plant for me after I had admired her's. I planted it promptly, not wanting to waste any time. I have never in my life seen such a fast growing plant. Within 6 months, my plant went from one single stalk to well over 40 multiple stalks that measured up to 10 feet tall and 12 feet in diameter.
It smells exactly like buttered popcorn if you rub the leaves, water the leaves or if a breeze blows through them.
The yellow flower stalks are beautiful and flower all 12 months of the year in central Arizona. It is necessary to cover them if the night time temp falls below freezing for 3 or more nights. Other than that, I haven't done anything special other than feed during planting and once a year after that. I water mine once every two weeks Nov - March and twice a week during the hot summer months.

This graceful, feathery shrub hails from Africa. In St. Petersburg, Florida, we bought three as eight-inch rooted cuttings from a "backyard breeder" down the street. We planted in full sun, about three feet apart, fairly sandy soil, with water 3x weekly and no other special treatment. Six months later, the shrubs are rounded in shape, about 3' in diameter by 4' tall and flowering beautifully. The foliage is a soft neutral green, and the flower stalks are about a foot long. Visibility from the road is very nice. I plan to to prune them after flowering to maintain their shape and will try to remember to update on the success of that.

This plant is also a food source for some sulpher butterfly caterpillars. I grew this plant in Florida and raised butterlies from it and I've also seen caterpillars on the plants here on Guam.

Larvicidal properties of aqueous extracts of the leave stem and root barks of Senna didymobotrya (Fabaceae) were evaluated against the malaria vector (Anopheles fluviatilis) under physiological conditions. Larvicidal assays showed that early larval stages were more prone to the lethal effects of the plant extracts, and that the root barks extract possessed the strongest larvicidal activity. Larvicidal effects were obtained after 3 hours of incubation of the larvae in 1,0.1, or 0.01% w/v solutions of the aqueous extracts. It was concluded that S. didymoborya is a potential mosquito larvicide.