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Polygonaceae family

Seagrape Coccoloba uvifera

Native
Deer-resistant — Low palatability to browsing deer. Usually passed over, but no plant is truly deer-proof when food is scarce.
Early-season nectar — Flowers in a late-winter / early-spring window when few other plants in our catalog bloom — valuable early forage for pollinators (relative to our catalog's bloom coverage).

Seagrape is a perennial tree native to the lower 48 states, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. It grows to 25 ft and blooms Jan – Dec in full sun – part shade, with purple fruit.

More about this plant

Coccoloba uvifera is a species of tree and flowering plant in the buckwheat family, Polygonaceae. Its common names include seagrape and baygrape. It is native to coastal beaches throughout tropical America and the Caribbean. It has edible fruit, among other uses. Wikipedia →

Growing & care

USDA PLANTS · TRY
Conditions
Sources · Conditions
USDA PLANTS — Sun · Soil & moisture
USDA — SoilPH — Soil pH
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Fertility Requirement / Soil Adaptation — Fertility need · Adapts to
USDA — Temp-Min °F — Hardiness
Sun
Full sun – part shade
Soil & moisture
Low moisture
Soil pH
5–8
Fertility need
Low
Adapts to
Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
Hardiness
USDA zone 9+
Size & form
Sources · Size & form
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Height, Mature — Height
Derived (allometric) — width = height × functional-class crown ratio fit on USDA Urban Tree DB · Tallo; method per Jucker et al. 2022, Pretzsch et al. 2015 — Mature width
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Planting Density (per acre) — Spacing
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Growth Rate / Spread / Growth Form / Lifespan / Active Growth Period / Seed Period — Spread · Growth rate · Growth form · Active growth
USDA PLANTS — Lifespan
TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0) · USDA PLANTS — Foliage
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Fruit/Seed Color / Fruit Persistence — Fruit
Lifespan: USDA’s lifespan scale for trees: short = under ~100 years · moderate = 100–250 · long = over 250. Balsam fir and other short-lived conifers are genuinely short for a tree, not short like an annual.
Height
25 ft
Mature width
~ 21 ft wide DERIVED derived estimate — open-grown crown allometry (height × growth-form ratio); not a measurement
Spacing
8–12 ft apart from USDA planting density
Spread
Slow
Growth rate
Slow
Growth form
Multiple stems
Lifespan
Perennial · long-lived
Foliage
Evergreen broadleaf · coarse texture
Active growth
Year-round
Fruit
Purple
In the garden
Sources · In the garden
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Propagation Method / Commercial Availability — Propagate by · In the trade
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Germination (cold stratification) — Seed starting
USDA PLANTS — Seed Period — Seeds ripen
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Foliage Texture / Browse Palatability / Resprout — Deer browsing · Resprouts if cut
Propagate by
Seed, Cuttings, Container
Seed starting
No stratification needed
Seeds ripen
Year-round seed-collection / harvest window
In the trade
Routinely available
Deer browsing
Low often deer-resistant
Resprouts if cut
Yes regrows after top-kill
Sub-canopy / understory layer — Sits in the understory of a layered food forest or polyculture.Open guide →
derived roles
AI = read by an AI vision model · DERIVED = a computed estimate, not a direct measurement. The “How we know this” section below details each.
The garden year bloom → fruit → fall colour
J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
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Bloom
Fall colour
Bloom (the flower's colour) Fall colour
Bloom · Jan – Dec — 52 obs · USA-NPN — Nature's Notebook (CC BY 4.0)
Fall colour · 190 obs · USA-NPN observed “coloured leaves” — timing varies by site & year
When to sow · for your area

Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.

Species characteristics from USDA PLANTS (public domain) + TRY (CC BY) — general guidance, not a guarantee for your exact site. Deer "browsing" is documented palatability, not a deer-proof claim.

Wildlife & pollinators

How pollinator value is scored →
❧ Caterpillar hosts Documented caterpillar host
Named species (a documented Nearctic sample, not exhaustive) from NHM HOSTS (CC0). ✦ = recorded on this exact species.
✦ Bees 5 bee visitors
Visitor records (observations, not exhaustive) from Noori et al. 2026 (CC BY 4.0) · GloBI → · ✦ = pollen-specialist bee (Smith et al. 2024)
Wildlife & visitors 2 birds · 2 mammals · 7 nectaring

Open records of who else uses Seagrape — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.

7 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers — the most-recorded:

Phocides batabano Marpesia petreus · Ruddy Daggerwing Papilio cresphontes · Eastern Giant Swallowtail Erynnis horatius · Horace's Duskywing Aguna asander Melanchroia chephise · White-Tipped Black
Interaction records (observations, not exhaustive) from GloBI → (CC0). Counts are distinct species; names are the most-recorded. Common names from Wikidata (CC0).
Species thumbnails re-hosted from iNaturalist — Creative Commons, credited per image (hover for credit). Click any species to see it on iNaturalist. Not exhaustive; many taxa have no openly-licensed photo yet.
How we know this (4) Methods & honest limits
Leaf build Direct fact

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.

Díaz, S. et al. (2022) The global spectrum of plant form and function: enhanced species-level trait dataset. Scientific Data 9:755.
Photosynthesis Direct fact

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.

Kattge, J. et al. TRY plant trait database — Categorical Traits Dataset (2012).
Climate niche (heat tolerance & native rainfall) Derived

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.

Realized-niche / climate-envelope approach (Pearson & Dawson 2003; Soberón 2007). Climate: NOAA NCEI nClimDiv county normals (1991–2020).
Mature width Derived

For woody plants that have a height but no measured crown, we estimate width = height × a crown-to-height ratio fit for that plant’s form (conifers narrower than broadleaf trees, shrubs widest), calibrated on our measured open-grown crowns and capped at the largest one ever measured. A measured crown always wins; herbaceous plants get nothing (no anchor).

Honest limits: A coarse class-median estimate for garden-scale spacing, not a measurement; woody single/multi-stem forms only.

Allometric basis: Jucker et al. 2022 (Tallo); Pretzsch et al. 2015; McPherson et al. 2016 (USDA Urban Tree DB).
Derived values are computed from open data by a published method — labelled, cited, and never shown as a direct observation. Full methodology →
Sources for this entry (37) Open & cited
[01] Scientific name & family — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[02] Growth habit & duration — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[03] Native status & distribution — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[04] Common name — USDA PLANTS (via GBIF)
[17] Invasive / introduced status — US-RIIS v2.0 (USGS)
[18] Wetland indicator — USACE National Wetland Plant List (2022)
[20] Description — Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
[21] Ecological value — GloBI
[24] Conservation rank — NatureServe Explorer (CC BY)
[26] Functional traits — TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0)
[27] Photosynthetic pathway — TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0)
[28] Climate niche — Derived — realized climate niche from U.S. county occurrences (GBIF) × NOAA NCEI county climate normals 1991–2020 (public domain)
[29] Wildlife & visitors — GloBI — Global Biotic Interactions (CC0)
[34] Bee specialists — Smith et al. 2024 (Zenodo, CC BY 4.0)
[35] Flower-visitor value (derived) — Noori et al. 2026 (CC BY 4.0) · GloBI
[36] Caterpillar species — NHM HOSTS (CC0)
[37] County range — GBIF Open Data — open-licensed occurrences (CC0/CC-BY) → county
Spot an error or have a better photo? Every field links to its source, and the whole dataset is open.
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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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