Alexandrian Laurel Calophyllum inophyllum
Alexandrian Laurel is a perennial tree native to the Pacific Basin. It grows to 40 ft in full sun – part shade, with brown fruit.
More about this plant
Calophyllum inophyllum is a large evergreen plant, commonly called tamanu, oil-nut, mastwood, beach calophyllum or beautyleaf. It is native to the Old World Tropics, from Africa through Asia to Australia and Polynesia. Due to its importance as a source of timber for the traditional shipbuilding of large outrigger ships, it has been spread in prehistoric times by the migrations of the Austronesian peoples to the islands of Oceania and Madagascar, along with other members of the genus Calophyllum. It has since been naturalized in regions of the East African coast. It is also a source of the culturally important tamanu oil. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun – part shade
- Soil & moisture
- Medium moisture
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 11+
- Height
- 40 ft
- Mature width
- ≈ 55 ft wide open-grown · ~15 ft in the wild
- Spacing
- 8–12 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Slow
- Growth form
- Single crown
- Lifespan
- Perennial · moderate
- Foliage
- Evergreen broadleaf · coarse texture
- Fruit
- Brown
- Propagate by
- Seed, Bare root
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Summer – Winter seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- 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 →❧ Caterpillar hosts Documented caterpillar host
Recorded feeding on Calophyllum in North America, including:
Wildlife & visitors 1 bird · 1 mammal
Open records of who else uses Alexandrian Laurel — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 1 bird and 1 mammal species (fruit, seed, browse):
Related plants
More Calophyllum →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
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 (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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