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Fabaceae family

Kentucky Coffeetree Gymnocladus dioicus

Native
Deer-resistant — Low palatability to browsing deer, and rated toxic — which deer tend to avoid. Usually passed over, but no plant is truly deer-proof when food is scarce.
USDA livestock toxicity rating — not a pet assessment. See the Toxicity detail further down for what's documented.

Kentucky Coffeetree is a perennial tree native to Canada and the lower 48 states. It grows to 100 ft and blooms Jun in part shade – shade, with green fruit.

More about this plant

The Kentucky coffeetree, also known as American coffee berry, Kentucky mahogany, nicker tree, and stump tree, is a tree in the subfamily Caesalpinioideae of the legume family Fabaceae, native to the Midwest, Upper South, Appalachia, and small pockets of New York in the United States and Ontario in Canada. The seed may be roasted and used as a substitute for coffee beans; however, unroasted pods and seeds are toxic. The wood from the tree is used by cabinetmakers and carpenters. It is also planted as a street tree. Wikipedia →

Growing & care

USDA PLANTS · TRY
Conditions
Sources · Conditions
USDA PLANTS — Sun · Soil & moisture
USDA — SoilPH — Soil pH
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Fertility Requirement / Soil Adaptation — Fertility need · Adapts to
USDA — Temp-Min °F — Hardiness
Sun
Part shade – shade
Soil & moisture
Medium moisture
Soil pH
6–8
Fertility need
Low
Adapts to
Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
Hardiness
USDA zone 4+
Size & form
Sources · Size & form
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Height, Mature — Height
USDA Urban Tree DB (public domain) — open-grown crown width — Mature width
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Planting Density (per acre) — Spacing
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Growth Rate / Spread / Growth Form / Lifespan / Active Growth Period / Seed Period — Spread · Growth rate · Active growth
USDA PLANTS — Lifespan
USDA PLANTS — FoliageTexture — Foliage
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Fruit/Seed Color / Fruit Persistence — Fruit
Lifespan: USDA’s lifespan scale for trees: short = under ~100 years · moderate = 100–250 · long = over 250. Balsam fir and other short-lived conifers are genuinely short for a tree, not short like an annual.
Height
100 ft
Mature width
≈ 45 ft wide open-grown, the broad end of measured crowns
Spacing
8–12 ft apart from USDA planting density
Spread
Slow
Growth rate
Slow
Lifespan
Perennial · long-lived
Foliage
coarse texture
Active growth
Spring & summer
Fruit
Green persists into winter
In the garden
Sources · In the garden
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Propagation Method / Commercial Availability — Propagate by · In the trade
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Germination (cold stratification) — Seed starting
USDA PLANTS — Seed Period — Seeds ripen
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Foliage Texture / Browse Palatability / Resprout — Deer browsing · Resprouts if cut
Propagate by
Seed, Cuttings, Bare root, Container
Seed starting
No stratification needed
Seeds ripen
Autumn – Spring seed-collection / harvest window
In the trade
Field collection only
Deer browsing
Low often deer-resistant
Resprouts if cut
Yes regrows after top-kill
Canopy layer — Sits in the canopy of a layered food forest or polyculture.Open guide →
derived roles
The garden year bloom → fruit → fall colour
J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
Bloom
Fall colour
Bloom (the flower's colour) Fall colour
Bloom · Jun — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — BloomPeriod
Fall colour · 234 obs · USA-NPN observed “coloured leaves” — timing varies by site & year
When to sow · for your area

Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.

Species characteristics from USDA PLANTS (public domain) + TRY (CC BY) — general guidance, not a guarantee for your exact site. Deer "browsing" is documented palatability, not a deer-proof claim.

Wildlife & pollinators

How pollinator value is scored →
❧ Caterpillar hosts ~5 caterpillar species

Gymnocladus supports ~5 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 Gymnocladus in North America, including:

Ascalapha odorata · Black Witch ✦ Hyphantria cunea · tiger moth ✦ Lymantria dispar · Gypsy Moth ✦ Orgyia leucostigma · White-Marked Tussock Moth ✦ Syssphinx bicolor · giant silk moth ✦ Syssphinx bisecta · giant silk moth ✦
Keystone count (genus-level) from Warren II 2026 (CC0) · Tallamy host-use records. Named species (a documented Nearctic sample, not exhaustive) from NHM HOSTS (CC0). ✦ = recorded on this exact species.
✦ Bees 1 bee visitor

1 native & managed bee species is documented visiting Kentucky Coffeetree :

Bombus griseocollis · Brown-Belted Bumblebee
Visitor records (observations, not exhaustive) from Noori et al. 2026 (CC BY 4.0) · GloBI →
Wildlife & visitors 1 nectaring

Open records of who else uses Kentucky Coffeetree — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.

1 adult butterfly & moth species is recorded nectaring at its flowers:

Tetracis cachexiata · White Slant-Line
Interaction records (observations, not exhaustive) from GloBI → (CC0). Counts are distinct species; names are the most-recorded. Common names from Wikidata (CC0).
Species thumbnails re-hosted from iNaturalist — Creative Commons, credited per image (hover for credit). Click any species to see it on iNaturalist. Not exhaustive; many taxa have no openly-licensed photo yet.
How we know this (1) Methods & honest limits
Climate niche (heat tolerance & native rainfall) Derived

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.

Realized-niche / climate-envelope approach (Pearson & Dawson 2003; Soberón 2007). Climate: NOAA NCEI nClimDiv county normals (1991–2020).
Derived values are computed from open data by a published method — labelled, cited, and never shown as a direct observation. Full methodology →
Sources for this entry (32) Open & cited
[01] Scientific name & family — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[02] Growth habit & duration — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[03] Native status & distribution — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[04] Common name — USDA PLANTS (via GBIF)
[18] Invasive / introduced status — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — native status
[20] Description — Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
[21] Ecological value — Warren II 2026 (CC0) · Tallamy host-use counts
[23] Conservation rank — NatureServe Explorer (CC BY)
[24] Climate niche — Derived — realized climate niche from U.S. county occurrences (GBIF) × NOAA NCEI county climate normals 1991–2020 (public domain)
[25] Wildlife & visitors — GloBI — Global Biotic Interactions (CC0)
[29] Flower-visitor value (derived) — Noori et al. 2026 (CC BY 4.0) · GloBI
[30] Caterpillar host count — Warren II 2026 (Dryad, CC0) · Tallamy host-use counts
[31] Caterpillar species — NHM HOSTS (CC0)
[32] County range — GBIF Open Data — open-licensed occurrences (CC0/CC-BY) → county
Spot an error or have a better photo? Every field links to its source, and the whole dataset is open.
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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