The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Geoffroea decorticans
Chañar is a small deciduous tree of arid and semi-arid forests in southern South America, valued for its sculptural, peeling bark and its edible fleshy orange fruit. It is a hardy, drought-tolerant tree that needs full sun and well-drained soil.
Geoffroea decorticans, the chañar, kumbaru, or Chilean palo verde (green wood), is a small deciduous tree, up to 8 meters (25 ft) tall that inhabits most arid forests (montes or espinales) of southern South America. The chañar is cold and drought deciduous; it loses its leaves in winter, and possibly in summer if conditions get too dry. It is native to Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, also present in Paraguay and southern Peru. It is a very characteristic tree in local culture and folk because of its vivid visual presence, propagation, and ancient ethnomedical uses.
The tree inhabits dry to arid spiniferous forests in a rather broad area of southern South America which extends mainly through I to IV regions of Chile and central and northern Argentina and throughout highland Bolivia, though it is also found in Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. Its companions conforming the forest are usually algarrobos, quebrachos, and the related and very abundant cavens. The species is in some areas associated with woody plant encroachment.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Geoffroea decorticans by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
