Autumn Olive Elaeagnus umbellata
Autumn Olive is an introduced perennial shrub, found in Canada, Hawaii, and the lower 48 states. It grows to 15 ft and blooms Mar in part shade – shade, with red fruit.
More about this plant
Elaeagnus umbellata is a species of flowering plant known as Japanese silverberry, umbellata oleaster, autumn olive, autumn elaeagnus, spreading oleaster, autumnberry, or autumn berry. The species is indigenous to eastern Asia and ranges from the Himalayas eastwards to Japan. It is a hardy, aggressive invasive species able to readily colonize barren land, becoming invasive in the central and northeastern United States and parts of Europe. Wikipedia →
Autumn 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.
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Part shade – shade
- Soil & moisture
- Medium moisture
- Soil pH
- 5–7.5
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 5+
- Height
- 15 ft
- Mature width
- ~ 13 ft wide DERIVED derived estimate — open-grown crown allometry (height × growth-form ratio); not a measurement
- Spacing
- 4–8 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Rapid
- Growth form
- Multiple stems
- Lifespan
- Perennial · short-lived
- Foliage
- Deciduous broadleaf · coarse texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Fruit
- Red 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
- No known commercial source
- Deer browsing
- Medium moderately palatable
- 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 24 bee visitors
24 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Autumn Olive — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 1 bird · 22 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Autumn Olive — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 1 bird species (fruit, seed, browse):
22 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers — the most-recorded:
Related plants
More Elaeagnus →
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.
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 (35) 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…