Eastern Swampprivet Forestiera acuminata
Eastern Swampprivet is a perennial tree native to the lower 48 states. It grows to 33 ft and blooms Apr in full sun, with black fruit.
More about this plant
Forestiera acuminata, commonly known as eastern swamp privet, is a deciduous shrub or small tree that is native to the southeastern and central United States, growing primarily in or near wetlands. It is especially common along the Mississippi Valley as far north as Illinois and Indiana, but found also across the South from eastern Texas to South Carolina. It grows in swamp forests as well as rocky edges of streams and ponds. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun
- Soil & moisture
- High moisture
- Soil pH
- 6–8
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 6+
- Drought tolerance
- Low
- Shade tolerance
- Low
- Wet-soil tolerance
- High waterlogging
- Height
- 33 ft
- Mature width
- ~ 20 ft wide DERIVED derived estimate — open-grown crown allometry (height × growth-form ratio); not a measurement
- Spacing
- 5–8 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Single stem
- Lifespan
- Perennial · long-lived
- Foliage
- Deciduous broadleaf · medium texture
- Active growth
- Summer
- Fruit
- Black
- Propagate by
- Seed, Bare root, Container
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Spring – Summer seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- 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 Forestiera in North America, including:
Wildlife & visitors 1 bird
Open records of who else uses Eastern Swampprivet — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 1 bird species (fruit, seed, browse):
Related plants
More Forestiera →
How we know this (3) 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.
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 (31) 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…