Pinguin Bromelia pinguin
Pinguin is a perennial wildflower native to Puerto Rico. It grows to 4 ft and blooms Jul in full sun, with yellow fruit.
More about this plant
Bromelia pinguin, also called ananas or anana, is a plant species in the genus Bromelia. This species is native to Central America, Mexico, the West Indies, and northern South America. It is also reportedly naturalized in Florida. It is very common in Jamaica, where it is planted as a fence around pasturelands on account of its prickly leaves, and has historically been used as an herbal abortifacient. The plant can be stripped of its pulp, soaked in water, and beaten with a wooden mallet, and it yields a fiber whence thread is made. In Nicaragua and El Salvador it is used to make gruel. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun
- Soil & moisture
- Low moisture
- Soil pH
- 4.5–6.5
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 10+
- Height
- 4 ft
- Spacing
- 4–8 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- Rapid
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Rhizomatous
- Lifespan
- Perennial · short-lived
- Foliage
- Evergreen broadleaf · coarse texture
- Active growth
- Summer
- Fruit
- Yellow persists into winter
- Flower colour
- Red AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Seed, Cuttings, Container
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Summer – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- Medium moderately palatable
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts Documented caterpillar host
Recorded feeding on Bromelia in North America, including:
Wildlife & visitors 1 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Pinguin — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
1 adult butterfly & moth species is recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Bromelia →
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
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.
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 (30) 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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