Coastal Wattle Acacia cyclops
Coastal Wattle is an introduced perennial shrub, found in the lower 48 states. It grows to 12 ft and blooms Apr in part shade – shade, with black fruit.
More about this plant
Acacia cyclops, commonly known as coastal wattle, cyclops wattle, one-eyed wattle, red-eyed wattle, redwreath acacia, western coastal wattle, and as rooikrans or rooikrans acacia in South Africa, is a species of flowering plant in the family Fabaceae. The Noongar peoples of Western Australia know the plant as wilyawa or woolya wah. It is a dense shrub or tree with narrowly oblong to elliptic phyllodes, spherical heads of golden yellow flowers, and linear, leathery pods with colourful seeds. The species is native to Australia, and is distributed along the west coast of Western Australia as far north as Leeman, and along the south coast into South Australia. It has been introduced to several other countries. Wikipedia →
Coastal Wattle is flagged invasive in the U.S. These natives fill a similar niche — same growth habit, bloom season, height, and region — so you keep the look and feed local wildlife instead of spreading a problem.
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Part shade – shade
- Soil & moisture
- Medium moisture
- Soil pH
- 6–8.3
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 9+
- Height
- 12 ft
- Mature width
- ~ 10 ft wide DERIVED derived estimate — open-grown crown allometry (height × growth-form ratio); not a measurement
- Spacing
- 6–8 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Rapid
- Growth form
- Multiple stems
- Lifespan
- Perennial · short-lived
- Foliage
- Deciduous broadleaf · fine texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Fruit
- Black persists into winter
- Flower colour
- Yellow AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Seed, Cuttings, Bare root, Container
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Summer – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Field collection only
- Deer browsing
- Low often deer-resistant
- Resprouts if cut
- Yes regrows after top-kill
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~11 caterpillar species
Acacia supports ~11 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a moderate genus.
Recorded feeding on Acacia in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
Related plants
More Acacia →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
For woody plants that have a height but no measured crown, we estimate width = height × a crown-to-height ratio fit for that plant’s form (conifers narrower than broadleaf trees, shrubs widest), calibrated on our measured open-grown crowns and capped at the largest one ever measured. A measured crown always wins; herbaceous plants get nothing (no anchor).
Honest limits: A coarse class-median estimate for garden-scale spacing, not a measurement; woody single/multi-stem forms only.
McKenzie et al. assigned each species a flower colour with a GPT-4V vision model over iNaturalist photos. We use the confident tier plus a separately-labelled lower-confidence top-up (mostly inconspicuous green/brown flowers), and render it as a small tint — never as an asserted fact, and kept out of the written synopsis.
Honest limits: AI image inference (~87% expert agreement on the confident tier); a decorative, confidence-tiered indicator, not a measured trait.
Sources for this entry (32) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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