I thought you might like to take a look at an interesting native plant from another part of the world this morning—central South America.
Don't you love that trunk? The toborochi tree (Ceiba speciosa) looks pregnant! In Bolivia, legends say a beautiful goddess hid inside the tree to give birth so the forces of evil wouldn't find her and kill her and her baby. She comes out only in the form of the tree's beautiful pink flowers which attract her mate, the hummingbird god. This gleaned from several unverifiable sources on the web, but whether it's an actual Bolivian legend, I liked it.
A common name for the toborochi in Spanish is arbol botella (bottle tree), which is fitting, too. And, the trees are sometimes called palo borracho (drunken stick) because as they age they begin to look disheveled and the upper trunk becomes distorted.
I have seen the plant labeled "silk floss tree" at conservatories, where it is usually too small to have the big bulge. Young trees have multitudes of thorny spines along the trunk which help protect the juicy juvenile from predators in the wild; at the conservatory they keep children from grabbing hold and climbing up. (Some of us are grateful for these sorts of blessings!)