Coco Plum Chrysobalanus icaco
Coco Plum is a perennial tree native to the lower 48 states, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. It grows to 41 ft and blooms Jan – Oct.
More about this plant
Chrysobalanus icaco, the cocoplum, paradise plum, abajeru or icaco is a low shrub or bushy tree found near sea beaches and inland throughout tropical Africa, tropical Americas and the Caribbean, and in southern Florida and the Bahamas. An evergreen, it is also found as an exotic species on other tropical islands, where it has become a problematic invasive. Although taxonomists disagree on whether Chrysobalanus icaco has multiple subspecies or varieties, it is recognized as having two ecotypes, described as an inland, much less salt-tolerant, and more upright C. icaco var. pellocarpus and a coastal C. icaco var. icaco. Both the ripe fruit of C. icaco, and the seed inside the ridged shell it contains, are considered edible. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 11 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 41 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
- Flower colour
- Green AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos — lower-confidence (a more subjective call, often an inconspicuous flower); not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts Documented caterpillar host
Recorded feeding on Chrysobalanus in North America, including:
✦ Bees 3 bee visitors
3 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Coco Plum :
Wildlife & visitors 38 birds · 8 mammals · 15 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Coco Plum — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 38 birds and 8 mammals species (fruit, seed, browse) — the most-recorded:
15 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers — the most-recorded:
Related plants
More Chrysobalanus →
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 (25) 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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