Texas Madrone Arbutus xalapensis
Texas Madrone is a perennial tree native to the lower 48 states. It grows to 33 ft and blooms Mar – Apr.
More about this plant
Arbutus xalapensis, commonly known as the Texas madrone, Amazaquitl, or Texas madroño, is a species of flowering plant in the heather family. It is native to Central America, the southwestern United States, and throughout Mexico. It is found in canyons and mountains, on rocky plains, and in oak woodlands, at altitudes of up to 3,000 m (9,800 ft) in the south of the range, but lower, down to 600 m (2,000 ft) in the north of the range. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 8 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 33 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~12 caterpillar species
Arbutus supports ~12 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 for introduced plants — native genera typically support far more.
Recorded feeding on Arbutus in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
Wildlife & visitors 1 bird · 2 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Texas Madrone — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 1 bird species (fruit, seed, browse):
2 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Arbutus →
How we know this (2) 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.
Sources for this entry (20) 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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