Common name: Hummingbird Tree

Hummingbird Tree is a multipurpose tree legume native to Southeast Asia, with a natural range spanning Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. 

It grows fast under ideal conditions and may reach up to 10 m (32 ft), though it is more commonly 3 to 8 m (10 to 26 ft) tall. The trunk is usually straight, with deeply furrowed grey-brown bark, and supports a crown of wide-spreading branches. However, it is short-lived, having a useful life of only around five years.

Leaves are up to 30 cm (1 ft) long and feathery, consisting of twenty to sixty dull green, oblong leaflets arranged in pairs along the length.

The flowers are large, up to 10 cm (4 in) long, with fleshy white petals, though pink- and red-petalled varieties also occur. Blooms are at their heaviest in the winter, with lighter blooms on and off throughout the year. The flowers hang in clusters of two to five and possess a peculiar odour. They are followed by long, thin, stringy seedpods that hang down from the branches. These turn brown when mature, then split along their length to release small brown seeds.

Singapore

Edible uses

Cooked vegetable - White-flowered varieties are cultivated for their unopened flowers, which are edible and eaten steamed, stir-fried, dipped in batter and fried, made into fritters or added to soups. The flowers of pink- or red-flowered varieties taste bitter and are generally not eaten.

Edible gum - The bark, when wounded, yields an edible gum suitable as a substitute for Gum Arabic (fromSenegalia senegal). When freshly exuded, it is either red or white-tinged with red; on exposure to air, it hardens into a dark red-violet gum.

Material uses

Plant fibre pulp - The wood is soft, white and light-weight, in the 400 to 500 kilograms per cubic meter (25 to 30 pounds per cubic foot) range. It is occasionally pulped to make newsprint.

Firewood - Although lightweight and burns quickly without much heat, it is favoured as firewood in its native range because of the tree's fast growth and its ability to coppice or regrow after harvesting. When grown for pulp or firewood, it is spaced around 90 cm (3 ft) apart.

Livestock feed - The leaves and young seedpods have value as livestock feed, with the leaves becoming available less than six months after sowing. They have a combined crude protein content of around 36% of their dry weight.

Health uses

In traditional medicine, a tea made from the leaves is used as a diuretic and laxative.

The flowers for sale (Darwin, Australia)

Climate

Grows naturally in humid tropical lowland climates, generally in areas with annual lows of 18 to 25°C, annual highs of 27 to 35°C, annual rainfall of 900 to 4000 mm and a dry season of 7 months or less, extending to drier areas with irrigation.

Growing

New plants are usually grown from seed, which remain viable for up to a year in storage. It performs best in free-draining, moisture-retaining clay-loam, loam, and sandy-loam soils that are moderately acidic to slightly alkaline, generally with a pH of 5.5 to 7.5, and in full sun. However, it will grow well in almost any well-drained soil because it fixes nitrogen and tolerates seasonal flooding.

Problem features

It seeds freely, with the seed falling from the seedpods to the ground after they split open. Some areas report open thickets where it grows, but there are no records of it as a serious weed. The Hawaii Pacific Weed Risk Assessment (HPWRA) project assesses it as a low weed-risk species for Hawaii.

Books

• Adams, C. D. 1972, Flowering plants of Jamaica, University of the West Indies, Mona, Greater Kingston

• Barwick, M., et al. 2004, Tropical & subtropical trees : a worldwide encyclopaedic guide, Thames and Hudson, London

• Francis, J. K. and Liogier, H. A. 1991, Naturalized exotic tree species in Puerto Rico, General technical report SO-82, USDA Forest Service, Southern Forest Experiment Station, New Orleans

• Gohl, B. 1981, Tropical Feeds : feed information summaries and nutritive values (Revised edition), Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Rome

• Hocking, D. 1993, Trees for drylands, International Science Publisher, New York

• Howes, F. N. 1949, Vegetable gums and resins, Chronica Botanica Company, Waltham, Massachusetts

• Jensen, M. 1999, Trees commonly cultivated in Southeast Asia : an illustrated field guide, 2nd ed., Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (RAP), Bangkok

• Little, E. L. et al. 1964 and 1974, Common trees of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands (2 volumes), Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Washington D.C.

• Luna, R. K 1996, Plantation trees, International Book Distributors, Dehradun, Uttarakhand

• Mollison, B. 1993, The permaculture book of ferment and human nutrition, Tagari Publications, Tyalgum, New South Wales

• Nair, P. K. R. 1993, An introduction to agroforestry, International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF), Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht

• National Research Council (Board on Science and Technology for International Development) 1979, Tropical legumes : resources for the future, The National Academies Press, Washington D. C.

• National Research Council (Board on Science and Technology for International Development) 1980, Firewood crops : shrub and tree species for energy production (Volume 1), The National Academies Press, Washington D. C.

• Parrotta, J. A. 2001, Healing plants of peninsular India, CABI Publishing, Wallingford, Oxfordshire

• Selvam, V. 2007, Trees and shrubs of the Maldives, Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) RAP publication (Maldives), Thammada Press Company Ltd., Bangkok

• Webb, D. B. 1984, A Guide to species selection for tropical and sub-tropical plantations, 2nd ed., Unit of Tropical Silviculture, Commonwealth Forestry Institute, University of Oxford, Oxfordshire