PlantFiles: Tower Tree
Schizolobium parahyba

Growing this tree in Anaheim, California, it took 4-5 years to reach 20 feet, and flowered and set seed. It is a spectacular plant. Gardeners would stop at our house just to ask what it was.

this very fast growing tree does not like cold or frost . if a tree gets to big cut to any height and it will re-grow. can get dried out on very hot days if left dry to long.

This plant grows well in St Pete, Fl. It gets knocked back by our occasional freezes but recovers quickly. In this area it rarely or sparsely seeds due to the lack of natural pollinators. The seed pods look like 4" long flattened tadpoles which turn black as they mature, crack open and release their single seed looking like a 1" elongated flat lima bean.

I was pointing out this tree to my dad the other day as a good alternative for a big tree for our garden. That´s a fast growing species, usually one of the first to take over the upper layers of recovering forests. It has been only recently used for gardening and landscaping, so that´s still a species with a great potential to be explored.

This is a good shade tree for summers in So Cal if you live in a warm, not too windy areas. This is one of the fastest growing trees, reaching heights up to 50' in just 3-4 years. However, here in So Cal, it often gets blown after that (wimpy roots). In the tropics it can grow up to 100'. My first impression of this tree was that it must be some sort of unique tree fern. It has one straight up trunk topped with a horizontal plane of legumatous, ferny-like leaves in 360 degrees, making a nice dappled shade. I have seen one enormous specimen in Thailand that flowered (rarely if ever witness that in So Cal) and it had multiple branches way high up. Here in So Cal it is just a single stem and the only branches are the small, weak ones at the very top holding the leaves. It is, however, here in So Cal, decidious, and just a stick in the winter. Where I lived in Thousand Oaks in California, this was a very marginal plant and many died in order for me to have one survive. It loves heat, and can survive in very sunny, hot areas with well draining soil that do get pretty cold in the winter.

Have a new place to grow this plant, and am much more successful in this less chilly climate (San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles county). Other things I noticed about this plant- leaves fold up for the night. Just like in Caesalpinias and some other legumes. Also, branches are quite sticky after being formed until a few months later when the stickiness seems to dry up.