A silken touch to the landscape
Silk cotton (Ceiba pendantra) trees are having a productive spell now in Chennai, and they better make the most of it, as they would soon slip into obscurity and that would be their lot when they are not sporting the eye-catching seed pods.
From lining avenues in Chennai, they have been reduced to scattered insignificance. On Anderson Road, one will come across a stand of three silk cotton trees, pointing to their preferred status in the past as avenue trees.
Now, they live unseen and are usually ignored except when they put out their seed pods. The seed pods, elongated and oval-shaped, are green in the flush of youth, and turn brownish and open up exposing bright-white, extremely fibres when mature. Silk cotton trees can now be seen giving up their fibres, the brown-coloured pods breaking open. There are some trees that have a mix of mature and immature pods; and some, such as the one at a gated community on Santhome High Road, displays a profusion of still-young seed pods (they did on April 25, 2025). But they could have matured since the last time they were seen, the natural process being accelerated naturally.
T.D. Babu, tree conservationist and a member of the Chennai District Green Council, notes an unfounded argument placed against the tree led to its unpopularity.
'Word spread without any basis that the fluffy fibres would aggravate respiratory problems,' says Babu, suggesting that it was a case of giving a dog a bad name and hanging him.
And some Ceiba pendantra trees have been lost on account of infrastructure work.
'We lost five trees along Royapettah High Road, near the Luz Church Road-Kutchery Road junction, due to Metro rail project,' says Babu.
He says the loss of Ceiba pendantra is not just loss of green cover, but a loss to sustainability. Silk cotton trees (also known as kapok trees) were intricately and inextricably tied to a mundane, everyday of life — sleep and rest.
Before the proliferation of foam-based mattresses and pillows, those made with ilavam panju (silk cotton) were ubiquitous.
'We are living in times when we hear of how mattresses, foam-based mattresses are among the major pollutants of marine waters, and we cannot help thinking of how easy the silk cotton mattresses were on the environment. A silk cotton mattress would never leave a home. When the silk cotton in a mattress has grown old, lost its suppleness and therefore its cushioning effect, it would be removed and dried and it would then go into making pillows. The mattress would be filled with fresh silk cotton. When a mattress has become irredeemable, the cloth would be stitched into pillow covers. Nothing ever left a home,' recalls Babu.
On Besant Avenue Road, at Rajaji Bhavan, maintained by Central Public Works Department and housing government offices, one finds tall Ceiba pendantra trees. The trees are reportedly around from the time the facility was established, which was in the late 1990s. According to someone who has seen these trees grow, they give up their branches in cyclone-induced gusty conditions. And he believes that this quality makes them an unfavourable choice as avenue trees.
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