The Water Gun Tree
In childhood, we called this plant the shoo shoo tree.
Before they burst into bloom, the brown buds are leathery in appearance and resemble a waterskin, which is true to its nature, since the horn-shaped casings are in fact filled with water. When we were kids, we’d remove the tip and squeeze the bud. A stream of water would squirt out. In this way, we made our own backyard water gun fights.
Except we had no such tree in our backyard.
The only tree we knew of grew in back of the church we attended. Sundays the tree was off limits, but on Wednesdays, when we had Primary, we’d visit the tree to check of there was a fresh crop of buds waiting to be turned into squeezable artillery.
It was only much later that I learned that African Tulip was the proper name for the shoo shoo tree
I hadn’t thought about that tree and its ready-made water guns for years.
But today, when passing the tennis courts at Ala Moana Beach Park, I was distracted by the screeching of a small flock of rose-ringed parakeets. When I looked up, I saw their green wings and long green tail feathers flare then fold as they settled briefly in the upper branches of an African tulip in bloom.
In the early sun, it looked as if the crown of the tree had burst into flames.
And there was something dramatic about the green parakeets flocking about the tree lit up with a fiery rim of flowers. But the African Tulip, for all its floral glory, will always be to me—the shoo shoo tree—with its budding clumps of compressible water-canons waiting to be squeezed.
