Tamarind Tamarindus indica
Tamarind is an introduced perennial tree, found in the lower 48 states, U.S. outlying islands, and the Pacific Basin. It grows to 50 ft and blooms Apr in part shade – shade, with brown fruit.
Tamarind 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
- 4.5–8
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 10+
- Height
- 50 ft
- Mature width
- ~ 30 ft wide DERIVED derived estimate — open-grown crown allometry (height × growth-form ratio); not a measurement
- Spacing
- 12–16 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- Slow
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Single stem
- Lifespan
- Perennial · moderate
- Foliage
- Evergreen broadleaf · fine texture
- Active growth
- Year-round
- Fruit
- Brown persists into winter
- Propagate by
- Seed, Container
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Winter – Spring 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 →❧ Caterpillar hosts Documented caterpillar host
Recorded feeding on Tamarindus in North America, including:
+ 1 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees 1 bee visitor
1 native & managed bee species is documented visiting Tamarind :
Wildlife & visitors 1 bird · 5 mammals · 1 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Tamarind — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 1 bird and 5 mammals species (fruit, seed, browse):
1 adult butterfly & moth species is recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Tamarindus →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
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.
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.
For woody plants that have a height but no measured crown, we estimate width = height × a crown-to-height ratio fit for that plant’s form (conifers narrower than broadleaf trees, shrubs widest), calibrated on our measured open-grown crowns and capped at the largest one ever measured. A measured crown always wins; herbaceous plants get nothing (no anchor).
Honest limits: A coarse class-median estimate for garden-scale spacing, not a measurement; woody single/multi-stem forms only.
Sources for this entry (32) 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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