Holywood Guaiacum sanctum
Holywood is a perennial tree native to the lower 48 states and Puerto Rico. It grows to 30 ft and blooms Apr, with yellow fruit.
More about this plant
Guaiacum sanctum, commonly known as holywood, lignum vitae or holywood lignum-vitae, is a species of flowering plant in the creosote bush family, Zygophyllaceae. It is native to the Neotropical realm, from Mexico through Central America, Florida in the United States, the Caribbean, and northern South America. It has been introduced to other tropical areas of the world. It is currently threatened by habitat loss in its native region, and as such, is currently rated near threatened on the IUCN Red List. Guaiacum sanctum is the national tree of the Bahamas. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Soil pH
- 6–8.5
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 11+
- Height
- 30 ft
- Spacing
- 8–12 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Growth rate
- Slow
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · medium texture
- Active growth
- Spring
- Fruit
- Yellow persists into winter
- Flower colour
- Purple AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Seed
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Spring – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- Deer browsing
- Low often deer-resistant
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →✦ Bees 1 bee visitor
1 native & managed bee species is documented visiting Holywood :
Wildlife & visitors 13 birds · 4 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Holywood — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 13 birds species (fruit, seed, browse) — the most-recorded:
4 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Guaiacum →
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
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 (30) 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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