There are plenty of ethnohistorical references to the ceiba tree as a giant tree upholding the world. In most contexts it is clearly a sacred tree. Most civilizations of Mesoamerica show the spiny ceiba tree in their art: Mixtec, Aztec, Maya and other cultures. Sacred ceiba tree of life, the world tree of Maya religion and cosmology The cane sugar clear-cutting only happened a few decades ago.īut if a ceiba tree has no other trees around it, and lots of sun everywhere, it may indeed have branches everywhere (especially if the top of the tree is injured, but I estimate this upper tree injury is not absolutely required to encourage branches all up and down the trunk). When you see tall Ceiba trees with no branches in the middle of a cane sugar plantation, there are no branches because most were chopped off, or, this tree is 300 years old and 200 years ago it was still a jungle around it. Yes, most really tall trees have no branches, since the lower areas are in shade (caused by surrounding trees). If your data base is 100 ceiba trees, instead of one or two, it is easier to understand the growth patterns of Ceiba pentandra. This is often a result of the top of the tree being injured (by lightening) so all the energy of growth remains in the lower area of the tree trunk. To call a Ceiba pentandra tree “largely branchless” is no surprise, since 80% of the trees that grow along the tourist route have not many low branches.īut there are plenty of giant ceiba trees which have branches all up and down the truck. “Largely branchless” is a copy-and-paste error from people who have perhaps only seen the famous Ceiba pentandra tree of TikalĨ0% of the web sites simply copy-and-paste (mis-)information from other web sites who have copied and pasted from elsewhere. Our page here is to correct a few misconceptions. Thus it is sad to see how many web sites copy-and-paste mistaken beliefs about the Ceiba trees. Today in 2015 I am still studying these trees: especially in the Costa Sur, Alta Verapaz, Izabal, and El Peten.
I continued studying Ceiba pentandra trees in the 1990’s and have increased my research on the conical spines over the last eight years. I was growing ceiba trees by the early 1970’s (along the entrance to my Yaxha Project camp, El Peten, while working five years to create the national park there).
I saw my first ceiba trees in Guatemala in 1965 (as a Harvard student, working for 12 months for the Tikal archaeological project of the University of Pennsylvania museum).
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