Description

Call it Cassia fistula, if you prefer, but few locals will know what you mean. We see golden and white— never call them plain — and rainbow shower trees. They present overlapping bloom cycles that vary slightly from windward to leeward and into the mountains. There should be festivals and holidays but people rarely mention the shower trees, and you never see groups gathering to gawk. (Unlike one neighborhood “gold tree.”)

On remote islands with fragile ecosystems and ardent defenders, the shower trees remind us: not all newcomers are invaders. Even if they were, some are quite welcome. Mitigating circumstances apparently include extreme beauty and extraordinary grace, as long as they behave themselves.

Shower trees were not in this area before humans were, so they are not indigenous. And they did not earn second-hand respect by arriving on early explorers’ canoes. It was only later. You can almost imagine them as bittersweet consolation for other things that arrived, a very small consolation for people who wear flowers and walk strong in beauty regardless.

For the record: It’s a flowering plant in the subfamily, Caesalpinioideae of the legume family, Fabaceae.