December 30, 2025

Flowers like fireworks

Fireworks are already happening above our heads almost every night.

The Botong tree (Barringtonia asiatica) has one of the most beautiful flowers, and we only see them once they’ve fallen to the ground. Unless you’re up for an early walk.

My wife found a random Botong tree, a predominantly coastal tree, deep inside the heart of Pangasinan far away from the coast.

Bats and moths are drawn to them, pollinating them in the dark. By next morning the flowers fall, having done their task for only a single night.

Botong is a coastal tree, found around beaches and mangrove forests all over the Philippines and other coastlines from India to Australia. This is because, like coconuts, their seeds float and travel far and wide when they fall and reach water.

A Botong flower on Danjugan Island off the coast of Negros. Locally known as Balubitoon.

They are an ancient presence in these areas, so ancient they’ve long been used by the Panay Bukidnon to heal, as well as fishers to fish. The seeds contain a toxin traditionally used to stun fish, which ironically has also been used to treat burns, ring worm, cough, flu… depending on which Indigenous experts you ask from India to the Philippines.

So ancient, there are places named after the tree. Barangay Bitoon in Cebu is named after its Cebuano name, Bitoon. Barangay Dibutunan in Luzon is named after Butung, while nearby Dinggalan is named after another local name for the tree, Dingkalan. All of these places are by the ocean.

I’m happy to have encountered this tree so far deep inside Pangasinan, in a landlocked town. I wonder how it got here. Its flowers have sparked my imagination this New Year.

Flowers like fireworks, seeds that carry both risk and remedy, floating with intention or surrender until we find ground.

Botong flowers on the ground somewhere in Manila.

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Filed Under: Diary, Environment, Philippine Species