Knockaway Ehretia anacua
Knockaway is a perennial tree native to the lower 48 states. It grows to 49 ft.
More about this plant
Ehretia anacua is medium-sized tree found in eastern Mexico and southern Texas in the United States. It is a member of the family Ehretiaceae. One of its common names, anacua, is derived from the Mexican Spanish word anacahuite, as is that of the related Cordia boissieri, the anacahuita. That word in turn is derived from the Nahuatl words āmatl, meaning "paper," and cuahuitl, meaning "tree," possibly referring to the bark. It is also known as knockaway, a corruption of anacua, and sandpaper tree. Alternate spellings are anaqua and anachua. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 10 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 49 ft
- 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 Ehretia in North America, including:
✦ Bees 1 bee visitor
1 native & managed bee species is documented visiting Knockaway :
Wildlife & visitors 1 bird · 3 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Knockaway — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 1 bird species (fruit, seed, browse):
3 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Ehretia →
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 (20) 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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