Bombax ceiba L. (BOMBACACEAE)
Common names
Sanskrit: Salmali.
Booruga: Booruga.
Tulu: Booruga.
Tamil: Pula-maram, Ilava.
Malayalam: Mullu buragamara, Mocha, Elevam, Poola.
Telugu: Pula, Salmali, Mundla buraga.
Description: Trees that shed their leaves, reaching heights of up to 40 meters, typically possessing buttresses; their bark is grayish and adorned with prickles. Leaves palmately compound; petioles 12-25 cm long; leaflets 5-7, lanceolate to elliptic, 12-24×7-10 cm, tapering at base, acuminate at apex; petiolules 2-2.5 cm long. Flowers solitary or in clusters towards tips of leafless branchlets, 10-12 cm long. Calyx campanulate, irregularly 2-5 lobed, silky inside. Petals 5, obovate to elliptic-obovate, rarely oblong, fleshy, bright red (or white). Stamens 65-80, in 6 bundles in 2 series. Ovary 5-locular; stigmas 5-fid. Fruit a capsule, oblong to ovoid, 11-18 cm long, velvety, 5-valved, valves silky inside. Seeds numerous, pyriform, dark brown, embedded in creamy white silky fibres.
Flowering: February – March
Fruiting: April – May
Distribution: India: Throughout up to 1500 m.
Uses:
- The soft leaves, flower buds, and succulent calyces are consumed. The youthful roots can be eaten either raw or roasted, much like sweet potatoes. The blunt thorns from the trunk of young trees are chewed as a substitute for betel-nut. Although perishable, the wood is one of the most useful ones in India. The timber is most widely used in the match industry, especially for matchboxes. It is suitable for the manufacture of cheap grade light plywood for tea chests, packing cases, for canoes, shingles, toys, scabbards, musical instruments, pencils, penholders, frames, light cooperage, coffins, well-curbs, brush handles, as cushions for mine props, and for inside partitions of opium chests. Fine shaving of wood, known as wood-wool are good for packing.
- When in full bloom, these trees create a spectacular display of vibrant colors and are commonly planted in avenues. Their seeds are enveloped in silky cotton, which constitutes the commercially valuable ‘kapok’. The floss is suitable for stuffing life-belts and other life saving appliances, besides mattresses, cushions and pillows, upholstery and quits. The floss is also used as an insulating material for refrigerators and sound-proof covers and walls. It is also used for packing fragile goods and for making padded surgical dressings. Young twigs and leaves are lopped for fodder. The seeds are fed to cattle. The seed-cake is an excellent cattle-feed.
- The young tap root is reported to possess astringent, stimulant, tonic, aphrodisiac, emetic and demulcent properties, it is also used in dysentery; the infusion of the bark is given as a demulcent, emetic and tonic, and its aqueous extract mixed with curd is used to check blood-dysentery; externally it is used as styptic, and also for fomenting wounds; the paste of the bark is applied to skin eruptions; the gum known as ‘Semul’; gum or & ‘Mocharas’ is credited with astringent, tonic and demulcent properties and is used for dysentery, haemoptysis in pulmonary tuberculosis, influenza and menorrhagia; the flowers are astringent and cooling; the paste of flowers, as also that of leaves, is employed as an applications in cutaneous troubles; the young fruits are reported to be employed as expectorant, stimulant and diuretic and considered beneficial in calculous affection, chronic inflammation and ulceration of the bladder and kidney.