Description

Call it Cassia fistula, if you prefer, but few locals will know what you mean. We see golden and rainbow and white — never call them plain — shower trees in overlapping bloom cycles that vary slightly from windward to leeward and inland mountains. There should be festivals and holidays but people rarely mention the shower trees, you never see groups gathering to gawk.

On remote islands with fragile ecosystems and ardent defenders, the shower trees remind us: not all newcomers are invaders. Some are quite welcome.

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

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