Sindora glabra Seeds | Sindora
LATIN NAME: Sindora glabra
COMMON NAME: Sindora
Plant Profile
Sindora glabra is a big tropical hardwood of the Hainan lowland rainforest, twenty to twenty-five metres at maturity, with a clean straight trunk and a wide crown of glossy pinnate leaves. It belongs to the same subfamily of the pea family that gives the rosewoods and the cassias, and it carries the family’s signature in its fruit: great flat pods, ten or more centimetres long, studded with resin blisters that smell like turpentine when broken.
The local name for the species in Hainan translates roughly as oil tree, because a cut in the trunk yields a heavy, oily resin that country people collected for lamps. That same fragrant heartwood, dense and oily, made it a prized cabinet timber, and decades of cutting have left the wild population thin enough that Chinese authorities now list the species as endangered.
Science & Biotechnology
The resin is the scientific story: sesquiterpene-rich oleoresin seeps from wound sites, a chemistry shared across the resinous legumes of the Sindora and Copaifera line, and wood-anatomy work on the species documents the oil-carrying tissue that gives the timber its water resistance. Population studies on Hainan describe small, fragmented remnants concentrated in a few protected forest blocks.
The seed is botanically demanding: a few large, hard-coated seeds per pod, oily, short-lived and unable to withstand drying, which is why reforestation programmes rely on rapid collection from standing trees rather than stored stock.
Uses & Benefits
Its uses divide into the historical and the current. Historically: lamp oil from the trunk, one of the fine timbers of Hainan, pods and seeds in village use. Currently: conservation planting, botanical collection, and reforestation trials in its native forest blocks, where the species is being returned to logged ground. Seed orchards on Hainan now supply part of that replanting material.
For growers in the humid tropics it is a noble shade and specimen tree, fast in youth in true tropical heat, and a legitimate conversation piece, a legume that leaks lamp fuel. Outside the frost-free lowland tropics it remains a glasshouse subject.
Growing from Seed
Sow fresh or not at all. Extract the big seeds from ripe pods, nick the hard coat on the side away from the eye, and sow immediately two centimetres deep in a rich, free-draining mix at twenty-five to thirty degrees. Germination comes within one to three weeks and the seedling throws a deep taproot before the shoot builds, so start it in a deep container from the first day.
Grow on in full tropical sun with steady heat and water; growth is quick in the first years where the climate is genuinely hot and humid. Mulch the base generously and keep the root run cool. It has no frost tolerance worth mentioning, and outside the lowland humid tropics its culture is a matter of the largest, warmest glasshouse available.
Our Take
A tree of the rainforest floor grown into a giant, and every part of it, oily wood, resin and giant pods, tells the same story. Fresh seed, deep pots, real heat: that is the whole recipe.
Related Reading
Gardeners who grow Sindora often pair it with these related subjects: