Mahbubur Rashid
With its blends of soft red, pink and yellow, the fragrant cannonball flower (Couroupita guianensis) is a favorite of Sri Lanka’s Buddhists when making floral offerings during religious activities. They call it sal, with religious tales linking the tree to the birth and death of Gautama Buddha, the founder of the faith. Hindus in the region call it nagalingam, a flower offered to Lord Shiva, the most powerful of gods in the Hindu pantheon.
The problem, however, is that the cannonball tree isn’t the sacred plant that countless devotees believe it to be. In fact, it didn’t arrive in Asia until the late 1800s, brought over from its native Central and South America by the British. That means there’s no way it could be part of the canon of Hinduism or Buddhism, which were established more than 2,000 years earlier.
The cannonball tree gets its common name from its large, round fruit. Its scientific name, Couroupita guianensis, refers to the Guianas, the region of South America from where the plant was first described. Image by Mokkie via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
The Handbook to the Flora of Ceylon by the British botanist Henry Triman (compiled between 1893 and 1900) doesn’t mention the cannonball flower; nor does Flora of British India by the botanist J.D. Hooker in 1875.
“These books contain details on both introduced and naturalized plants but the cannonball tree is conspicuous by its very absence in these historical scientific compilations on the island’s fauna, indicating that the tree was not naturalized or found locally at the time,” said Siril Wijesundara, former director-general of the Department of the Botanical Gardens of Sri Lanka.
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“The cannonball tree was introduced to Sri Lanka with the planting of the first sapling at the Royal Botanical Gardens of Peradeniya, way back in 1881,” Wijesundara told Mongabay. He added the plant adapted well to Sri Lankan soil, reaching fruit-bearing stage after about 15 years.
A century ago, when the plant was still relatively new here, there was no confusion about the identity of the cannonball tree, Wijesundara said: it was recognized as an introduced plant.
