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Project Noah Nature School
Koelreuteria paniculata
It is popularly grown as an ornamental tree in temperate regions all across the world because of the aesthetic appeal of its flowers, leaves and seed pods. Spotted at Alkazar park, Larissa city, Thessaly, Greece.
Spotted on Oct 12, 2013
Submitted on Oct 14, 2013
5 Comments
Hello Despina. I also found in internet the mention about edible roasted seeds but in another site they said it was a "famine food". All trees of the family contain saponins, some are slightly toxic, some can loose their toxicity when roasted, some others are not toxic, some others are considered as pharmaceutical plants. There are some, mainly Chinese, universities performing research on the chemical compounds isolated from Koelreuteria in order to use their toxicity as potential anticancer drugs but till now it is too early to judge if some interesting molecule could be isolated, combining low toxicity with good anticancer activity. See for instance here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23857...
Dear @suzmonk, they're very popular here too... Recently I found out that the seeds are edible, and can be roasted! This is quite interesting, as the species could be added in the "source plants" mission too :)
Thank you dear @Maria dB :)
Nice. I recently ID'ed unusual trees around the courthouse in a small U.S. town. They turned out to be Golden rain trees and Chinese rain trees ... some city father with a sense of whimsy!
Very nice series