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Pentadesma butyracea
Also called Buttertree, Kanya, Tallowtree
1 NParks heritage tree in Singapore: Found in Singapore Botanic Gardens, behind Block 5
Pentadesma butyracea is a tall forest tree of tropical West and Central Africa, grown mainly for its seeds, which yield a butter similar to shea butter, and for its timber. It is a wild forest species rather than a common garden plant, so care notes apply mainly to cultivation attempts.
Pentadesma butyracea is a tree native to the forests of tropical Africa from Sierra Leone to Cameroon. It has multiple uses, the main one being the manufacture of a kind of butter called "kpangnan butter" similar to shea butter. The timber is used in cabinetmaking and construction.
It is sometimes called African butter tree.
The seeds are used to make kpangnan butter also called painya, kanya in Benin, kanga in Sierra Leone, akpoto in Togo among others. This butter can be stored for one to three years without going rancid.
[Contains information from Leaf Area Index (LAI) and Heritage Trees from data.gov.sg (National Parks Board), made available under the terms of the Singapore Open Data Licence version 1.0]
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Pentadesma butyracea 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.
