Indiantree Spurge Euphorbia tirucalli
Indiantree Spurge is an introduced perennial tree, found in Hawaii, the lower 48 states, and the Pacific Basin. It grows to 15 ft.
More about this plant
Euphorbia tirucalli is a tree native to Africa that grows in semi-arid tropical climates. A hydrocarbon plant, it produces a poisonous latex that can cause temporary blindness. Wikipedia →
Indiantree Spurge 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- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 11 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 15 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Deciduous broadleaf
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~7 caterpillar species
Euphorbia supports ~7 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.
Recorded feeding on Euphorbia in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees specialist-bee host · 1 bee visitor
Specialist native bees depend on it.
Some native bees are pollen specialists (oligolectic) — they raise young only on pollen from particular plant genera. Euphorbia is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
1 native & managed bee species is documented visiting Indiantree Spurge :
Wildlife & visitors 1 mammal
Open records of who else uses Indiantree Spurge — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 1 mammal species (fruit, seed, browse):
Related plants
More Euphorbia →
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
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 (25) 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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