Cassia bakeriana Seeds | Pink Shower

Pink Shower (Cassia bakeriana) with dense clusters of pink flowers covering a leafless spring crown — Pink Shower (*Cassia bakeriana*): Fabaceae, the Thailand wishing tree that flowers before its leaves.

LATIN NAME: Cassia bakeriana

COMMON NAME: Pink Shower, Wishing Tree

Plant Profile

The Pink Shower is a small deciduous tree of the pea family from Thailand and mainland Southeast Asia, and its moment is brief and complete: in the dry season, on branches carrying not a single leaf, it opens dense clusters of soft pink flowers that fade towards white as they age, covering the crown in a fortnight of bare-branch bloom that has made it a fixture of Thai temple grounds and avenues. The pinnate leaves follow the flowers, and by summer the tree is a modest, green, unremarkable presence six to twelve metres tall.

The long, cylindrical pods that follow hang on the branches into the dry season, and it is the flowering event, not the foliage, that earns it its place. In Thailand it is planted near temples as a wishing tree, and its bloom marks the season in the towns where it grows.

Science & Biotechnology

Its leafless, synchronised flowering is a textbook tropical phenology: by shedding leaves and blooming in the dry season, the tree maximises the visibility of its display to pollinators across a leafless landscape, a strategy shared with a handful of famous tropical trees and studied in the phenology literature. The genus it sits in has been reshuffled by molecular work, and Cassia in the strict sense is a smaller group than the trade’s old label implied, with many of the garden cassias now formally in related genera. Its flowers are worked by large bees, and the hard seed coat of the pod is a physical dormancy barrier that requires scarification to germinate, a fact that shapes both its ecology and its propagation.

In cultivation outside the tropics it is strictly a warm-climate tree, and its compact size relative to the larger shower trees has made it a favourite for smaller tropical gardens.

Uses & Benefits

In a tropical or near-tropical garden it is a spring spectacle tree: a single specimen in a lawn, an avenue tree, or a temple-garden planting where its brief, complete bloom is the point. The scale is manageable, the leaf canopy light enough to underplant, and the dry-season flowering means the show arrives when the garden is otherwise at its thinnest.

Its bark and pods place it in the same medicinal family as the sennas, whose laxative compounds are standardised worldwide, but this species’ own drug record is minor, and its garden value is ornamental.

Growing from Seed

Nick the hard seed coat with a file or pour boiling water over the seed and soak it overnight, then sow into a loose, free-draining tropical mix at 24 to 30 °C; germination follows within a week or two and the seedlings grow fast. Pot on regularly and grow them in full sun with steady water.

Plant out into deep, well-drained soil in full sun where winters are frost-free, spacing for a ten-metre crown, and water through the first two dry seasons. It flowers within four to six years, sheds its leaves on schedule, and after establishment asks only for space and admiration. Prune only to shape when young.

Our Take

The wishing tree of Thailand: two weeks of bare-branch pink in the dry season, then modest green for the rest of the year. A spectacle worth planning a garden around.

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