Arabian Coffee Coffea arabica
Arabian Coffee is an introduced perennial tree, found in Hawaii, the Pacific Basin, and Puerto Rico. It grows to 15 ft and blooms Apr in full sun, with red fruit.
More about this plant
Coffea arabica, also known as the Arabica coffee, is a species of flowering plant in the coffee and madder family Rubiaceae. It is believed to be the first species of coffee to have been cultivated and is the dominant cultivar, representing about 60% of global production. Coffee produced from the less acidic, more bitter, and more highly caffeinated robusta bean makes up most of the remaining coffee production. The natural populations of Coffea arabica are restricted to the forests of South Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Yemen. Wikipedia →
Arabian Coffee 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- Sun
- Full sun
- Soil & moisture
- High moisture
- Soil pH
- 4–7.5
- Fertility need
- High
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 9+
- Height
- 15 ft
- Mature width
- ~ 13 ft wide DERIVED derived estimate — open-grown crown allometry (height × growth-form ratio); not a measurement
- Spacing
- 6–8 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Multiple stems
- Lifespan
- Perennial · moderate
- Foliage
- Evergreen broadleaf · medium texture
- Active growth
- Year-round
- Fruit
- Red
- Propagate by
- Seed, Container
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Spring – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Resprouts if cut
- Yes regrows after top-kill
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 Coffea in North America, including:
✦ Bees 63 bee visitors
63 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Arabian Coffee — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 1 bird · 1 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Arabian Coffee — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 1 bird species (fruit, seed, browse):
1 adult butterfly & moth species is recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Coffea →
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.
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.
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.
Sources for this entry (34) 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).
Loading…
BibTeX
Loading…