Pride
of
Barbados

Pride of Barbados has flashy flowers, but is more useful as a 'silent doctor.'

Barbadian herbal educator, Annette Maynard-Watson, checked with her 90 year old friend Evelyn (Granny) Walcott to ascertain what healing properties the Pride of Barbados (Caesalpinia pulcherrima) might contain. Granny, proprietor of Granny's Restaurant is a virtual encyclopedia of healing herbs. Granny told her the flowers and leaves were made into a tea to be given to babies before they went to bed.

It also can be used against malaria, as an anti-inflammatory, an antimicrobial, against staph infections, asthma and is said to kill cancer cellsshe reported on her web-site, silentdoctors.com.

Pride of Barbados is a member of the pea family, (Fabacceae.) Caesalpinia was given to this species by Karl Plumier an eighteenth century botanist after Andrea Cesalpino (1519-1603) who was earlier gardener. The first garden in Italy was established in Padua by his teacher, Luca Ghini in 1546. Cesalpino wrote “De plantis libri” in 1583 the most important book in botany of his day. He did the first scientific classification of plants according to the Catholic Encyclopaedia. Pulcherrima means very pretty, as it is.

The flowers at the Garden Club's tree are yellow, but most of these trees have orange-red flowers with a tinge of gold on the end. They bloom flamboyantly throughout the year. Each flower has five petals with ten long red stamens protruding from the corolla. The flowers are two to three inches across and bowl-shaped and grow on terminal clusters. Widely grown across the south and west, in Hawaii they are used for making leis.

It is called flowerface, peacock flower, Mexican bird of paradise and dwarf flamboyant as well as Pride of Barbados.

The bush grows to twenty feet in height and just as wide. It is fast growing and can be pruned back to ground level each year to produce a fuller bush. It like our alkaline soil, is drought tolerant and salt wind tolerant. In the Garden Club it grows on the top of the hill where it gets constant salt wind, full sun and is in a place where it is well-drained.

The leaves look like a royal poinciana leaf and often this plant is nicknamed the dwarf poinciana. They are small, fern-like and have many small oval leaflets on twice compound branches. Some owners report that they dead head the plant as they get lots of seedlings if they don't.

The seeds grow in pods and are small and brown. When the pod opens it noisily pops. Germination is fairly easy. Scar a seed and soak it in water for twenty-four hours. The water should turn brown. Plant the seed and water. If you over-water this plant it gets straggly. It does not mind drought conditions and in fact, it will grow much thicker if it if dry.

This plant is good if you want to make a fence out of the spectacular flowing shrubs. They can be kept in a pot and pruned to be shaped into a tree or a bush. It is an excellent specimen plant. In the north it can die back to the ground during winter and renew itself the next spring. It lost its leaves after Hurricane Wilma, but they came back within a few months, thicker than ever.

Butterflies love these flowers, especially the black swallowtail, the eastern tiger swallowtail and the painted lady. You will love them too as they wave their yellow fingers against the blue sky.