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
9 ft
Spacing
21–30 ft apart from USDA planting density
Growth rate
Slow
Growth form
Bunch
Lifespan
Perennial · moderate
Foliage
Evergreen broadleaf · coarse texture
Active growth
Spring & summer
Fruit
Black
In the garden
Sources · In the garden
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Propagation Method / Commercial Availability — Propagate by · In the trade
Shrub layer — Sits in the shrub of a layered food forest or polyculture.Open guide →
Rain garden / bioswale — Rated FACW on the wetland list — tolerates wet feet, so it suits the soggy zone of a rain garden or bioswale that catches and filters runoff.Open guide →
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.
Visitor records (observations, not exhaustive) from Noori et al. 2026 (CC BY 4.0) ·
GloBI →
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.
Frequently grows with
Across 160 U.S.
vegetation-survey plots that recorded Dwarf Palmetto, these catalog species turned up most often in the
same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
"%" = share of this plant's plots that also held the species. From
sPlotOpen → (Sabatini et al. 2021, CC BY 4.0) — open vegetation plots: wild community composition, not garden design.
Same genus / family, ranked by ecological value — from the PlantKey catalog
How we know this (2)Methods & honest limits ▸
PhotosynthesisDirect fact
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.
Kattge, J. et al. TRY plant trait database — Categorical Traits Dataset (2012).
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.
Spot an error or have a better photo? Every field links to its source, and the whole dataset is open.
Cite this pageOpen 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).
