The flowers burst open at dusk, drawing swarms of bees, spiders, and hummingbirds to what Ardelle Ferrer Negretti, the founder of a local community project to protect the ceiba, calls “the nectar feast.” When the sunlight fades into blackness, bats join the banquet. Dried, brown husks of expired blooms littered the ground below, blending with the scattered piles of wild horse dung to create an earthy potpourri. Only a few of the flowers remained during a visit to the island in late February. “It’s pretty amazing,” Edgar Oscar Ruiz, a 34-year-old local clean-energy activist living on Vieques, said staring up the tree’s trunk. And in February 2019, pompoms of pink blossoms unfurled for the first time since the hurricanes. But today, new growth sprouts from its gnarled branches. Photographs taken after Hurricane Maria show the tree leafless and badly damaged, with knobby limbs lying broken around its thick trunk. It’s the island’s oldest tree, estimated to be upward of 400 years old, and stands as Vieques’s third-most popular tourist attraction after a 174-year-old Spanish fort and a bioluminescent bay that boasts the brightest glowing dinoflagellates in the world. Rivera Pichardo for The Washington Post via Getty ImagesĬeiba trees, sometimes called kapok trees in English, dot the island, but there’s only one known as the ceiba. Destruction on the island of Vieques from Hurricane Maria, seen on September 25, 2017. Yet an ancient ceiba tree Viequenses consider sacred is staging a remarkable comeback, one that symbolizes the resilience of the island itself for some residents. Wind-resistant palms, their trunks snapped by fierce gusts, remain permanently hunched. Patches of leafless gray splotch mangroves that once covered nearly half the 52-square-mile island in greenery. The flora, too, bear the scars of the most destructive storms in modern American history. It’s been a year and a half since hurricanes Irma and Maria pummeled Vieques, a tiny island of off Puerto Rico’s eastern coast, and still many homes lay in rubble, electric wires hang precariously from poles, and a crippled cargo ferry system causes shortages of groceries. This story was originally published by HuffPost and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
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