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Cochlospermum vitifolium
Also called Buttercup Tree
Silk cottontree (Cochlospermum vitifolium), also called buttercup tree, is a deciduous tree up to about 12 m tall with large yellow flowers. It is a drought-tolerant tree of seasonally dry tropical forest, so it needs full sun and a dry season rather than frequent watering.
Cochlospermum vitifolium or rosa amarilla is a tree belonging to the family Bixaceae. It reaches up to 12 metres (40 ft) in height and its leaves are deciduous. Its flowers are showy, yellow, solitary, and large, up to 10 centimetres (4 in) across. They resemble roses but do not belong to the same family. It inhabits the dry jungles of southern Mexico to Central America from sea level to 1,200 metres (3,900 ft) elevation. Its wood produces a yellow-orange dye used for dyeing cotton clothes.
Native to tropical America, it presents a continuous distribution, found in the tropics from western Mexico, through Central America and the northern part of South America, to Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, the Guyanas, and Trinidad. In Mexico, it is distributed in warm, semi-warm, and temperate climates from sea level to 1,000 metres (3,300 ft), present in disturbed vegetation associated with dunes, mangrove edges, savannah, tropical forests deciduous, subdeciduous, subperennial, and perennial, xerophytic shrubland on plains or hills, spiny forest, on the edges of cloud forest, oak and pine forests.
Borututu · Cochlospermum regium · Silk-cotton tree · Buttercup Tree
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Cochlospermum vitifolium by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
