Planting now could yield a gorgeous Flamboyant red flood tomorrow

RASHMEE ROSHAN LALL May 13, 2014
Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz Island, Galapagos, Ecuador. Flowering Flamboyant trees line either side of the road in the El Eden section of Puerto Ayora

Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz Island, Galapagos, Ecuador. Flowering Flamboyant trees line either side of the road in the El Eden section of Puerto Ayora. Port au Prince could plan – and plant

In Haiti, the passionate red of Flamboyant tree flowers in Haiti is not quite like Japan’s yearly fabled froth of cherry blossom. Sydney-based writer Rebecca Giggs describes the Sakura as follows: “When the sprays of blossom finally break open through the capital, their momentum is as forceful as floodwaters returning. The cherries’ high, white foam pours through avenues that lead to shrines, into graveyards, over public lands, and then to the brink of rivers and lakes where great canopies of petals spread above koi fish the size of corncobs.”

Obviously, that’s not the way it is here. Roads in the Haitian capital are not lined with Flamboyant trees, so there isn’t a red flood as far as the eye can see.

This is an important caveat when it comes to possible Flamboyant tree-viewing picnics. But anyone with any pretensions to city-planning could look ahead and see with the mind’s eye that today’s planting would yield a gorgeous red wave a few years on.

(Tomorrow, One-hundred years on, who can expect to see a poem lovely as a tree?)

Jack Kerouac

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life”
– Jack Kerouac