Brazilian Bluewood Condalia hookeri
Brazilian Bluewood is a perennial tree native to the lower 48 states. It grows to 30 ft.
More about this plant
Condalia hookeri, called the Brazilian bluewood, is a widespread species of flowering plant in the family Rhamnaceae, native to Texas and eastern Mexico. It is a thorny shrub or small tree reaching 6 m (20 ft) but usually much shorter. Typically it is found growing in marginal habitats such as limestone slopes, sandstone bluffs, lunettes, shell ridges, juniper-dominated woodlands, or along watercourses, often in clayey or sandy soils, at elevations from 10 to 400 m. It may come to dominate an area as a thorny scrubland. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 10 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 30 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Evergreen 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 Condalia in North America, including:
✦ Bees 2 bee visitors
2 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Brazilian Bluewood :
Wildlife & visitors 5 birds
Open records of who else uses Brazilian Bluewood — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 5 birds species (fruit, seed, browse):
Related plants
More Condalia →
How we know this (4) 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.
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 (22) 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…