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Dombeya cacuminum (Strawberry Snowball Tree) - A beautiful fairly narrow upright evergreen tree to 50 feet tall with large maple-like leaves and in mid to late winter into spring appear the 1-foot-wide umbel-like clusters of 2 ½ inch wide five petaled coral-red flowers that hang at the branch tips.
Plant in full sun and water deeply and infrequently. Has proven cold hardy to short duration nighttime temperatures down to 25° F but is best in near frost-free locations. Unlike other Dombeya species in cultivation, the flowers drop to the ground prior to drying, making for a floral display on the ground and as such is a more attractive tree in and out of bloom.
Dombeya cacuminum comes from rainforests in northeastern and central Madagascar. Dombeya was a genus that was originally included in of the Sterculia family, the Sterculiaceae before being segregated to into the Byttneriaceae family (with chocolate, Theobroma cacao), but now has been reunited with its previous relatives as a subfamily, the Dombeyoideae, in the expanded Mallow family, the Malvaceae. The name for the genus honors Joseph Dombey, an 18th-century French botanist. The species was described by the Swiss botanist Bénédict Pierre Georges Hochreutiner in 1926 in his "Monographie des Dombeya de Madagascar" published in Candollea (3: 5–120) the journal of the Conservatory and Botanical Garden of the City of Geneva. The specific eptithet is the genitive plural of the Latin word 'cacumen' which has the meaning of the extreme point, peak, or top of something and is thought to refer here to the tip of branches where the flowers occur.
We have grown and sold this tree in limited quantites since 1983. There are several large specimens planted in the Huntington Botanic Gardens tropical garden, a nice specimen Alice Keck Park Memorial Gardens in Santa Barbara and a large old specimen on our nursery property behind our main greenhouse that we took our cuttings from.
The information about Dombeya cacuminum displayed on this web page is based on our research conducted in the nursery's horticultural library and from reliable online resources. We also include observations made about it as it grows in our nursery gardens and other gardens we have visited, as well how the crops have performed in containers in our nursery field. We will also incorporate comments we receive from others and welcome hearing from anyone with additional information, particularly if they can share cultural information that would aid others in growing this plant. |
