It has several local common names, such as palo borracho (in Spanish literally "drunken stick"), or árbol del puente, samu'ũ (in Guarani), or paineira (in Brazilian Portuguese).

The natural habitat of the floss silk tree is in the northeast of Argentina, east of Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, and southern Brazil.

In younger trees, the trunk is green due to its high chlorophyll content, which makes it capable of performing photosynthesis when leaves are absent; with age it turns to gray.

The fruits are lignous ovoid capsules, 20 centimetres (8 in) long, which contain bean-sized black seeds surrounded by a mass of fibrous, fluffy matter reminiscent of cotton or silk.

Outside of private gardens around the world, it is often planted along urban streets in subtropical areas such as in Spain, South Africa, Australia, northern New Zealand, and the southern USA, although its prickled trunks and limbs require establishing safety buffer zones around the tree in order to protect people and domesticated animals.