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Gleditsia
Also called Honeylocust, Honey Locusts
Gleditsia, the honey locusts, is a genus of spiny, fast-growing deciduous trees in the pea family, native to the Americas and Asia. Commonly grown members include the thornless and thorny honey locusts, prized as shade trees for their feathery foliage.
Gleditsia (honey locust) is a genus of trees in the family Fabaceae, subfamily Caesalpinioideae, native to the Americas and Asia. The Latin name commemorates Johann Gottlieb Gleditsch, director of the Berlin Botanical Garden, who died in 1786.
Gleditsia is found in East Asia, on the East Coast of the Americas, and in South America; small populations of certain species also exist around the Caspian Sea (G. caspica) and India (G. assamica). There are native species to all these regions. The theory is that Gleditsia originated in East Asia in the Eocene, crossed the land bridge across the North Pacific Ocean into North America, and then spread down to South America millions of years later. Gymnocladus is a sister genus of Gleditsia, and it too mimicked this dispersion pattern, except it came to the Americas much earlier. Though there are no extant European Gleditsia species, there are fossils found in Europe which could mean that the genus also crossed the North Atlantic land bridge.
Gleditsia sinensis is one of the 50 fundamental herbs used in Chinese herbology, where it is called zào jiá (皂荚).
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Gleditsia 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.
