A Tree That Carries History in Every Leaf.

Long before it lined boulevards in Mumbai or the great streets of Sri Lanka, Monoon longifolium — the tree called Mast Tree, False Ashoka, and the Buddha Tree — was woven into the life of the places that planted it.

Its older common name traces to Ashoka, the Sanskrit word meaning "without sorrow." The tree appears in the Ramayana, where Sita took shelter in an Ashoka grove. In Buddhist tradition, Queen Maya is said to have held a branch as she gave birth. For more than two millennia it has been planted beside Hindu and Buddhist temples as a living offering.

Ashoka — without sorrow. A name earned over three thousand years of human reverence.

In 2021 botanical registers moved it from Polyalthia longifolia to Monoon longifolium. The tree did not change. It is still a living column of wavy-edged leaves that layer from crown to ground in coppery bronze, lime, and glossy emerald.

The name Mast Tree comes from the other history. Lightweight, straight, flexible trunks were prized by British Royal Navy shipbuilders, who sourced them from colonial India for sailing masts. Disputes over that timber fed the Mast Tree Riot of 1734 in Massachusetts, one of the early recorded acts of colonial resistance.

This is not simply a landscape tree. It is a tree with a civilization behind it. In Florida, Epcot at Walt Disney World uses Mast Trees in its landscaping.

What the form does in a landscape

• Columnar, commonly 30–45 feet tall and 4–8 feet wide.
• In ideal conditions, specimens may exceed 60 feet.
• Pendulous branches clothe the trunk from crown to ground.
• Evergreen in zones 10–11, with warmer parts of 9b suitable for established trees.
• Fragrant pale-green star-shaped flowers for two to three weeks in spring.