This is a plant that flavors someone else’s drink rather than making one of its own, which is a strange kind of job for a tree, but a good one.
The Basics
Rosita de cacao, Quararibea funebris, is a fragrant flowering tree in the mallow family, Malvaceae, despite having cacao right there in its common name and having nothing to do with actual cacao. It also goes by flor de cacao, cacahuaxochitl in Nahuatl, or simply the funeral tree, a name that sounds morbid until you learn why.
Origin and Habitat
Native to southern Mexico and Central America, most strongly associated with Oaxaca, where it once grew wild across a much bigger range. Deforestation has squeezed that range down over the years, so a lot of what survives now grows in dooryards and home gardens rather than out in the forest.
What It Looks Like
An evergreen tree with a broad, tidy crown and leathery leaves that can run over a foot long, but nobody plants this tree for the leaves. It’s grown for the flowers, small and white, disproportionately fragrant for their size, followed by a small fruit that basically nobody talks about because the flower is the whole point.
Uses and Flavor
In Oaxaca the flowers go into tejate, a traditional drink made by grinding toasted corn, fermented cacao beans, and toasted mamey sapote seeds together on a metate, then thinning it with water. The dried flowers, and even the twigs, get worked in too, partly for flavor and partly because the twigs help whip the drink into its signature foam. Apparently a tejate isn’t a real tejate without it.
Growing It Here
A special one from Joe, the same tree I wrote about back on Day 205, planted mostly out of curiosity about a flower with such a specific, singular job in someone else’s traditional recipe.
Pests and Diseases to Watch For
Nothing to report so far.
Kenta’s Take
This tree just started flowering for the first time this year, 2026, after sitting there for years just being a nice looking tree that didn’t do much of anything. The smell caught me off guard, intoxicating and delicate at the same time, and it’s easy to see why, according to local lore, the flowers were once tucked away to hold their scent for generations. Now that it’s flowering I’m looking forward to actually working with it as an ingredient rather than just admiring it, maybe not full chocolate making yet, but a start.