Balete
Ficus caulocarpa
The plant today
Ficus caulocarpa is a flowering plant in the genus Ficus in the family Moraceae. It is native to southeastern Asia, from India and Sri Lanka easy to Taiwan and the Philippines, and also New Guinea. It is an often shrubby, multistemmed tree growing to 20 m tall. The leaves, of which three complete sets are produced each year (triannually deciduous), are entire and glabrous, and up to 22 cm long by 8.5 cm broad.
Excerpt from “Ficus caulocarpa” on Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Recorded in the Philippines
GBIF holds 271 records of this plant from the Philippines. The ones with map coordinates fall in 19 provinces, most often Batanes (11), Cagayan (7), Bataan (5), Bulacan (5), Davao del Sur (4), Isabela (4), Oriental Mindoro (4), Romblon (4), and 11 more.
Counts from GBIF occurrence records, October 2026. They include planted trees and garden plants, and a province with no records may only lack collectors.
What the 1985 book uses it for
A record of home remedies from 1985, with the book's amounts and doses reworded. It is not medical advice.
- Skin eruptions and dermatitisBark decoction as a wash.Boil 1 cup of chopped bark in half a gallon of water for 10 minutes. Wash the area twice a day.Page 38
The book prints Ficus stipulosa, a name now folded into Ficus caulocarpa. In everyday use balete covers many strangler figs, so the tree a reader knows by that name may be another species.
Summarised from Herminia de Guzman-Ladion, Healing Wonders of Herbs (Manila: Philippine Publishing House, 1985), where this plant is shown as “Balete” on page 73. The book is in copyright, so its wording and photographs are not reproduced. Amounts are the book's, restated.
Recent research
The most cited papers since 2018 that name this plant in the abstract, pulled from Europe PMC in October 2026. Titles are the authors' own and the findings have not been reviewed here.
- Fruiting phenology and nutrient content variation among sympatric figs and the ecological correlates