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Polyalthia fruticosa

Polyalthia fruticosa
Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author, CC BY 4.0

Polyalthia fruticosa is a small shrub in the custard apple family, native to the northern Cape York Peninsula in Queensland, Australia, and grown mainly as a native garden plant in the tropics. It is a shrub up to about 3 m tall with white flowers and red fruit, and it serves as a food plant for green-spotted triangle butterfly larvae.

Family
Annonaceae (Annon family)
Grows as
Shrub
Light
Part shade, Bright indirect
Water
Water regularly during the growing season and let the top of the soil dry slightly between waterings.
Soil
Well-drained, moist, fertile soil or a rich potting mix.
Temperature
18–30 °C; protect below 10 °C
How easy
Moderate
Native range
N Queensland
Climate
wet tropical

About

Polyalthia fruticosa is a plant in the custard apple family Annonaceae found only in the northern half of Cape York Peninsula, Queensland, from the Torres Strait to the McIlwraith Range. It is a shrub up to 3 m (9.8 ft) tall, producing white flowers and red fruit. It was first described in 2007 as Haplostichanthus fruticosus by the Australian botanist Lawrence W. Jessup, and transferred to the genus Polyalthia in 2018 in a broad taxonomic review of the genus by Xue et al.

It is one of the host plants for larvae of the green-spotted triangle butterfly (Graphium agamemnon).

Other Haplostichanthus plants

Polyalthia johnsonii · Polyalthia submontana

Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Polyalthia fruticosa 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.

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