Crimson Bottlebrush Callistemon citrinus
Crimson Bottlebrush is an introduced perennial tree, found in the lower 48 states and Puerto Rico. It grows to 7 ft and blooms Feb – Dec.
More about this plant
Melaleuca citrina, the common red bottlebrush, crimson bottlebrush, or lemon bottlebrush, is a plant in the myrtle family Myrtaceae, and is endemic to eastern Australia. Some Australian state herbaria continue to use the name Callistemon citrinus. It is a hardy and adaptable species, common in its natural habitat. It is widely cultivated, not only in Australia. It was one of the first Australian plants to be grown outside the country, having been taken to England in 1770 by Joseph Banks. Its showy red flower spikes, present over most of the year in an ideal situation, account for its popularity. Wikipedia →
Crimson Bottlebrush 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- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 10 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 7 ft
- Mature width
- ≈ 20 ft wide open-grown, the broad end of measured crowns
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Evergreen broadleaf
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts Documented caterpillar host
Recorded feeding on Callistemon in North America, including:
Wildlife & visitors 19 birds · 6 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Crimson Bottlebrush — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 19 birds species (fruit, seed, browse) — the most-recorded:
6 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Callistemon →
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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