Quickstick Gliricidia sepium
Quickstick is an introduced perennial tree, found in the lower 48 states, the Pacific Basin, and Puerto Rico. It grows to 65 ft and blooms Feb in part shade – shade, with black fruit.
More about this plant
Gliricidia sepium, often simply referred to as gliricidia or by its Spanish common name madre de cacao, is a medium size leguminous tree belonging to the family Fabaceae. It is an important multi-purpose legume tree, with a native range from Mexico to Colombia, but now widely introduced to other tropical zones. Wikipedia →
Quickstick 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
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 9+
- Height
- 65 ft
- Mature width
- ≈ 25 ft wide wild/forest-grown — open-grown specimens spread wider
- Spacing
- 8–12 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- Rapid
- Growth rate
- Rapid
- Growth form
- Single stem
- Lifespan
- Perennial · long-lived
- Foliage
- Evergreen broadleaf · fine texture
- Active growth
- Year-round
- Fruit
- Black
- Flower colour
- Pink AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Cuttings, Container
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Winter – Summer seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- High browsed readily
- 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 →✦ Bees 39 bee visitors
39 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Quickstick — the 12 most-recorded:
+ 6 more bees → ↑ show fewer
Wildlife & visitors 11 birds · 3 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Quickstick — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 11 birds species (fruit, seed, browse) — the most-recorded:
3 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Gliricidia →
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.
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).
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