Norfolk Island Pine Araucaria heterophylla
Norfolk Island Pine is an introduced perennial tree, found in the lower 48 states and the Pacific Basin. It grows to 50 ft in full sun – part shade, with brown fruit.
More about this plant
Araucaria heterophylla is a species of conifer. As its vernacular name Norfolk Island pine implies, the tree is endemic to Norfolk Island, an external territory of Australia located in the Pacific Ocean between New Zealand and New Caledonia. It is not a true pine, which belong to the genus Pinus in the family Pinaceae, but instead is a member of the genus Araucaria in the family Araucariaceae, which also contains the hoop pine and the monkey-puzzle tree. Members of Araucaria occur across the South Pacific, especially concentrated in New Caledonia, where 13 closely related species of similar appearance are found. It is sometimes called a star pine, Polynesian pine, triangle tree or living Christmas tree, due to its symmetrical shape as a sapling. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun – part shade
- Soil pH
- 4.6–7.8
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 11+
- Height
- 50 ft
- Mature width
- ~ 15 ft wide DERIVED derived estimate — open-grown crown allometry (height × growth-form ratio); not a measurement
- Spacing
- 8–12 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Growth rate
- Rapid
- Growth form
- Single crown
- Lifespan
- Perennial · moderate
- Foliage
- Evergreen broadleaf · coarse texture
- Fruit
- Brown
- Propagate by
- Seed, Cuttings, Bare root, Container
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Summer – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- Deer browsing
- Low often deer-resistant
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →Wildlife & visitors 4 birds
Open records of who else uses Norfolk Island Pine — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 4 birds species (fruit, seed, browse):
Related plants
More Araucaria →
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.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
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.
Sources for this entry (28) 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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