While he sleeps, the many species of animals that live in the tree (including frogs, snakes, sloths, birds, anteaters and monkeys) come down to speak to him.

She was attending graduate school at Yale University at the time and she wrote The Great Kapok Tree while on a train ride between New Haven and Washington, DC.

Soon thereafter, Tom Lovejoy, then at World Wildlife Fund, gave Cherry an artist in residency at WWF and he and the other scientists there provided her with their rainforest photographs to use as reference.

Lovejoy and other WWF biologists, and Brian Boom, the director of the NY Botanical Garden, facilitated her travel to Manaus, Brazil, to experience the rainforest firsthand.

[2] When the book was released in 1990, coinciding with the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day, Cherry told a reporter, "When kids grow up, in another 20 years, they'll be the people making the decisions.

Kapok trees, with their imposing height and girth (some species can grow to over 73 m (240 ft) in height and up to 5.8 m (19 ft) in diameter), feature largely in Native American mythologies (particularly that of the Maya) as embodiments of the Axis mundi, sustaining the entire cosmos by linking heaven, earth and the underworld (compare the mythical ash tree Yggdrasil).

[3] The compassionate woodman who decides to spare a single tree can thus be understood as standing for a decision by the human race to refrain from destroying the natural world in order to preserve it for future generations.

Kimberly Olson Fakih in the Los Angeles Times praised it for its "splendid paintings in tropical colors" but said the story was undermined by "soap-box oratory".