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As far as I know, there’s only one Erythrina crista-galli living as a street tree in Berkeley, though I’m sure there are others in people’s gardens. There used to be another in front of a house just over the Oakland line on MLK—just south of the infamous “Here/There” sculptures—but it got taken out for construction. A pity; most of the year that one looked like an accident in a stick factory, but when it bloomed, wow.  

The surviving street tree is a lot like that. It’s gawky, runtish, and oddly placed, uncomfortably elbowing a stop sign. Most of the time it’s a presumptuous shrub. But when it blooms in summer, it’s quite the looker.  

Its leaves are OK, nice strong-green pointed ovals, rather like lilac leaves. Its pale tan, deeply furrowed bark is actually handsome, especially on the trunk. But those flowers, now that’s a show; that’s what makes it worth stopping to see.  

They’re red and another red, one of those combinations only a diva like Mother Nature can get away with wearing, two shades of coral red. This plant has more “common” names than you can shake a stick at: cockscomb coraltree (a literal translation of the species binomial), cockspur coraltree, crybabytree, fireman’s hat, Brazilian coral tree, ceibo, and variations on most of those. The “cockspur” salutes the little tree’s thorns, which can be rather fierce. They’re strategically placed along the leaf “stem” and rather wickedly backward-pointed.  

The species hails from South America, from the rainforest-ish parts of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. It’s the national flower of the last two.  

There’s individual variation among the flower colors in these plants, and some correlation with the part of their ancestral range they come from—scarlet south to pink north. They bloom in long, loose, cone-shaped racemes at the ends of twigs, and a close look reveals a resemblance to wisteria blossoms, held at very different angles. Like wisteria, this is a pea.  

But don’t be deceived. The flowers are reportedly edible when cooked—though I haven’t found any recipes—but the seeds, brown-on-brown mottled beans, are toxic. If you eat them, your guts will have extremely strong objections in every direction, and you might get some neurological nastiness too.  

There’s a more benign culinary use for coraltrees: they’re planted to shade coffee and cacao bushes. Shade-grown chocolate, like shade-grown coffee, is a lot easier on the land and wildlife of its region, and self-help movements are just beginning to allow small-scale farmers and co-ops to grow premium cacao in the shade of planted and natural local trees, conserving those trees, the soil and some of the understory with them, and the birds and other animals native there. Even the mycorrhizae that mediates nutrients between roots and soil prospers better in a relatively undisturbed place, and the experts are beginning to conclude that the best cacao is what grows in concert with this soil-fungus net.  

By the way, the chocolate exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences’ temporary home at 875 Howard Street in San Francisco isn’t half bad, managing as it does to incorporate veterans of the Academy’s previous ants exhibit, South American history and pre-Columbian technology, anthropology and politics, bits of furniture that I truly covet, and just plain sensual fun. 

It runs through Sept. 5. Admission is free on the first Wednesday of each month; otherwise it’s $7 for non-members; hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. They won’t tell you about coraltrees, though. 

Seeing the tree in bloom, you won’t be at all surprised to read that hummingbirds are attracted to coraltree flowers. The plant’s tough for a tropical, too. In some places, people grow it as a houseplant or bring it indoors in winter; in such cold places, and sometimes here, it’s deciduous in winter. But it can freeze and die back all the way to its roots and still regenerate in spring, with winter temperatures all the way down to 20 degrees Fahrenheit.  

Might be an interesting small tree for your backyard. Certainly the example on Bancroft Avenue shouldn’t be completely lonesome in our adventurous town.