Russian Olive Elaeagnus angustifolia
Russian Olive is an introduced perennial tree, found in Canada and the lower 48 states. It grows to 35 ft and blooms Jun in part shade – shade, with yellow fruit.
More about this plant
Elaeagnus angustifolia, commonly called Russian olive, silver berry, oleaster, or wild olive, is a species of Elaeagnus, native to Asia and limited areas of eastern Europe. It is widely established in North America as an introduced species. Wikipedia →
Russian Olive 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.
Part of why it adapts so well: Russian Olive is a polyploid complex — multiple chromosome races are on record (2n = 12, 28). Spare genome copies give a plant extra raw material to evolve fast, and polyploidy is a documented correlate of successful plant invasions (te Beest et al. 2012). A labelled association from open cytology (ChromoDB), not a prediction for your specific site.
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Part shade – shade
- Soil & moisture
- High moisture
- Soil pH
- 6–9.5
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 4+
- Drought tolerance
- High
- Shade tolerance
- Low
- Wet-soil tolerance
- Low waterlogging
- Height
- 35 ft
- Mature width
- ≈ 50 ft wide open-grown, the broad end of measured crowns
- Spacing
- 6–12 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Rapid
- Growth form
- Single stem
- Lifespan
- Perennial · long-lived
- Foliage
- Deciduous broadleaf · coarse texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Fruit
- Yellow persists into winter
- Propagate by
- Seed, Bare root, Container
- Seed starting
- Needs cold stratification a cold-moist spell before it germinates
- Seeds ripen
- Summer – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- Low often deer-resistant
- 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 ~9 caterpillar species
Elaeagnus supports ~9 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a modest genus for introduced plants — native genera typically support far more.
Recorded feeding on Elaeagnus in North America, including:
+ 3 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees 20 bee visitors
20 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Russian Olive — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 6 birds · 3 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Russian Olive — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 6 birds species (fruit, seed, browse):
3 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Across 37 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Russian Olive, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Elaeagnus →
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.
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.
Sources for this entry (43) 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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