These striking yellow blossoms adorn Ventura every summer. The Cassia leptophylla (Gold Medallion Tree) is a broad semi-evergreen tree that grows to 25 feet tall and 20 feet wide and is drought tolerant. In early to mid-summer, the clusters of 3- to 5-inch wide deep yellow flowers appear. This is the most common and reliable of the Cassias in southern California – it was first planted in the Los Angeles County Arboretum in 1958, and has been an increasingly popular and very reliable and beautiful canopy tree in Ventura County landscapes. The name Cassia is from the ancient Greek ‘Kassia’, a name for the kassian plants that provided senna leaves and pods for medicinal use.
