Hues vary from palest cream and lemon yellow through all manner of peach and apricot tints to some that are a rosy orange. Flowers of individual trees often hold two tones, resulting in this variety of coloring. This is an effect that is enhanced frequently by the difference between the inside and outside of the petals, the buds being of a different color from the full blown flowers. There is a great difference, also, in the form of individual flowers.
There is considerable variation in the blooming period, but on the whole the Rainbow Shower trees come out later than the others, with July and August as the months of greatest bloom. They may be seen on Farrington street between Wilder and Beretania, and there are some fine individual specimens, one on Lunalilo street between Pensacola and Kapiolani, another on Makiki above Nehoa. A fine, clear, yellow flowering tree, sometimes mistaken for a pure Golden Shower, stands in Kamanele Park. (Plate III)
YELLOW POINCIANA _Peltophorum inerme Roxburgh_
A tree with many upright spikes of small, deep-yellow flowers, bright against the greenery of the fine-cut leaves is called the Yellow Poinciana, because it was once classed as a Poinciana. At the same time it is in bloom, it hangs full of reddish-brown pods which are one of its characteristic features. The flowers appear in the late summer and autumn, although there may be a second blooming period at some other time of year.
The flower buds are round and covered with brown, velvety down. This same down also covers the young growth and the midrib of the leaves. Individual flowers have five crepe petals of about the same size. The larger, triangular heads of bloom, are made up of smaller clusters. The reddish brown pods which follow the flowers remain on the tree for a long time. They are thin and flat and hold three or four seeds. The leaves are bipinnate, composed of many small rounded leaflets. There is no period when the tree is bare.
This tree, a member of the legume family, is a native of Malaya and the East Indies. It grows widely in Honolulu, with several fine specimens in the grounds of Iolani Palace. (Plate III)
MONKEYPOD TREE _Samanea saman_ (_Bentham_) _Merrill_
Those huge, wide-spreading trees—the largest trees in Honolulu—which in spring and summer are often covered with a thin film of pink flowers, are Monkeypod trees. Stately and massive, with rough, dark bark, the branches of these trees support a rounded canopy of leaves. It is a single layer thick and casts a light shade over an immense area of ground. There is a giant specimen in Moanalua Gardens; others grow in front of the Library of Hawaii, and traffic passes around another great tree in the middle of Vineyard street, near Nuuanu.