Chinaberrytree Melia azedarach
Chinaberrytree is an introduced perennial tree, found in Hawaii, the lower 48 states, and U.S. outlying islands. It grows to 50 ft and blooms Mar – May in part shade – shade, with brown fruit.
Chinaberrytree 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
- Low moisture
- Soil pH
- 4–8
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 9+
- Drought tolerance
- Moderate
- Shade tolerance
- Moderate
- Wet-soil tolerance
- Low waterlogging
- Height
- 50 ft
- Mature width
- ≈ 25 ft wide wild/forest-grown — open-grown specimens spread wider
- Spacing
- 12–17 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- Slow
- Growth rate
- Rapid
- Growth form
- Single stem
- Lifespan
- Perennial · moderate
- Foliage
- Deciduous broadleaf · fine texture
- Active growth
- Year-round
- Fruit
- Brown
- Flower colour
- Pink AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Seed, Cuttings, Bare root, Container
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Year-round seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- Low often deer-resistant
- 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 ~2 caterpillar species
Melia supports ~2 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 for introduced plants — native genera typically support far more.
Recorded feeding on Melia in North America, including:
✦ Bees 1 bee visitor
1 native & managed bee species is documented visiting Chinaberrytree :
Wildlife & visitors 67 birds · 9 mammals · 1 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Chinaberrytree — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 67 birds and 9 mammals species (fruit, seed, browse) — the most-recorded:
1 adult butterfly & moth species is recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Melia →
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.
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 (37) 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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