Tasmanian Bluegum Eucalyptus globulus
Tasmanian Bluegum is an introduced perennial tree, found in Hawaii, the lower 48 states, and the Pacific Basin. It grows to 160 ft and blooms Oct in part shade – shade, with black fruit.
More about this plant
Eucalyptus globulus, commonly known as southern blue gum or blue gum, is a species of flowering plant in the family Myrtaceae. It is a tall, evergreen tree endemic to southeastern Australia. This Eucalyptus species has mostly smooth bark, juvenile leaves that are whitish and waxy on the lower surface, glossy green, lance-shaped adult leaves, glaucous, ribbed flower buds arranged singly or in groups of three or seven in leaf axils, white flowers and woody fruit. Wikipedia →
Tasmanian Bluegum 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
- High moisture
- Soil pH
- 5–6.8
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 9+
- Height
- 160 ft
- Mature width
- ≈ 80 ft wide open-grown · ~30 ft in the wild
- Spacing
- 6–16 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Rapid
- Growth form
- Single stem
- Lifespan
- Perennial · long-lived
- Foliage
- Evergreen broadleaf · coarse texture
- Active growth
- Autumn through spring
- Fruit
- Black
- Flower colour
- White AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Seed, Bare root, Container
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Winter – 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 Documented caterpillar host
Recorded feeding on Eucalyptus in North America, including:
+ 3 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees 3 bee visitors
3 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Tasmanian Bluegum :
Wildlife & visitors 22 birds · 1 mammal · 1 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Tasmanian Bluegum — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 22 birds and 1 mammal species (fruit, seed, browse) — the most-recorded:
+ 1 more species → ↑ show fewer
1 adult butterfly & moth species is recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Eucalyptus →
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 (36) 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…