Geographic Distribution:
The wood commonly known as Royal Poinciana is known to botanists as Delonix regia.
D. regia is native to the African island of Madagascar, where it is endangered, but it has been planted, and in some cases even naturalized, throughout the tropical world. In the United States, D. regia is a popular ornamental and shade tree in central to southern Florida and southernmost Texas. It also readily grows in the Caribbean island territories and in the Pacific island territories as well. In fact, it is the official flower of the Northern Mariana Islands.
For the sake of simplicity I will refer to D. regia from here forward simply as Royal Poinciana.
General and Working Characteristics:
Royal Poinciana is not a timber wood so it has not been characterized as such. I can only record my experiences below but I cannot provide technical details.
Pricing and Availability
Royal Poinciana wood is seldom available for commercial sale. If it can be found at all, it would be sold through small, independent, hobbyist mills. Because Royal Poinciana is a favored decorative and shade tree, your best source of the wood will be tree services in the areas in which it is grown. Very occasionally, commercial sources will have obtained wood in likely this way that can then be purchased at a comparatively high price due to scarcity.
In this blog, I almost always recommend several vendors with whom I have done considerable business and in whom I have great confidence. These vendors are: West Penn Hardwoods, Bell Forest Products, Got Wood?, NC Wood, WoodTurningz, Amazon Exotic Hardwoods, Griffin Exotic Wood, Exotic Woods USA, and Wood Turning Blanks 4U.
Of these fine vendors none are currently selling Royal Poinciana but I obtained my large blank from Wood Turning Blanks 4U. They I turn sourced the material from a local Florida tree service. I in turn purchased the 12” x 3” blank in February of 2017 for $42.00
And in all seriousness, it is worth it to get to know some local tree services in your area if you want to work with non-commercial woods, some of which are a dream to turn. To a tree service, most of the wood is a waste that they will pay to dispose of and they are likely to all too happy to have you take it off their hands for a small fee or sometimes for free. However, if tree services are removing commercially valuable woods such as cherry or walnut, their intent will be to sell those logs, so expect to have to pay market prices in those cases. This is not usually the case with single trees however, but you can encounter that situation when larger lots are being cleared. If nothing else, it never hurts to ask around.
Woodfinder is an excellent website that is dedicated to advertising wood dealers. In your search for Royal Poinciana, this can be an invaluable resource provided you use multiple search terms to capture all the possible listings. I can’t speak to the quality of any of the listed dealers, but Woodfinder does have the advantage of allowing searches to be performed based on location which might allow an interested buyer to visit a listed wood dealer in person to hand pick pieces at a comfortable price.
A significant problem with using Woodfinder is that many vendors are listed for woods that, upon further investigation, they do not offer. I don’t know if perhaps once they did and they didn’t update their listings or if some vendors use a standardized list of woods that include most everything conceivable with the idea that once you land on their page you will find something you want to buy even if you didn’t know it beforehand. It happens to me all the time!
Uses
Royal Poinciana is strictly a hobby wood used in small scale projects such as turning.
Sustainability
Royal Poinciana is not listed as being in any way threatened or endangered by the Convention in International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) Appendices nor does it appear on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List.