Spiny Fiddlewood Citharexylum spinosum
Spiny Fiddlewood is a perennial tree native to the lower 48 states, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. It grows to 39 ft.
More about this plant
Citharexylum spinosum is a species of flowering plant in the family Verbenaceae that is native to southern Florida in the United States, the Caribbean, Guyana, Suriname, and Venezuela. Common names include Florida fiddlewood and spiny fiddlewood. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 11 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 39 ft
- Mature width
- ≈ 35 ft wide open-grown, the broad end of measured crowns
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
- Flower colour
- White AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts Documented caterpillar host
Recorded feeding on Citharexylum in North America, including:
✦ Bees 2 bee visitors
2 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Spiny Fiddlewood :
Wildlife & visitors 3 birds · 8 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Spiny Fiddlewood — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 3 birds species (fruit, seed, browse):
8 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers — the most-recorded:
Related plants
More Citharexylum →
How we know this (3) 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.
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 (23) 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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