Surinam Cherry Eugenia uniflora
Surinam Cherry is an introduced perennial tree, found in Hawaii, the lower 48 states, and Puerto Rico. It grows to 24 ft.
More about this plant
Eugenia uniflora is a flowering plant in the family Myrtaceae, native to tropical South America's east coast, ranging from Suriname, French Guiana to southern Brazil, as well as Uruguay and parts of Paraguay and Argentina. Wikipedia →
Surinam Cherry 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: Surinam Cherry is a polyploid complex — multiple chromosome races are on record (2n = 22, 33). 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- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 11 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 24 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Evergreen broadleaf
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts Documented caterpillar host
Recorded feeding on Eugenia in North America, including:
+ 3 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees 2 bee visitors
2 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Surinam Cherry :
Wildlife & visitors 12 birds · 1 mammal
Open records of who else uses Surinam Cherry — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 12 birds and 1 mammal species (fruit, seed, browse) — the most-recorded:
+ 1 more species → ↑ show fewer
Related plants
More Eugenia →
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 (24) 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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