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.
Zanthoxylum rhetsa
Also called Indian Ivy Rue
Cape Yellowwood (Zanthoxylum rhetsa) is a deciduous shrub or tree of tropical rainforest and coastal thickets, native from India east to the Philippines and south to northern Australia. It is grown mainly for its aromatic fruit spice and host to butterflies rather than as an ornamental.
Zanthoxylum rhetsa, commonly known as Indian prickly ash, is a species of flowering plant in the family Rutaceae and occurs from India east to the Philippines and south to northern Australia. It is a deciduous shrub or tree with cone-shaped spines on the stems, pinnate leaves with between nine and twenty-three leaflets, panicles of white or yellowish, male and female flowers, followed by spherical red, brown or black follicles.
Zanthoxylum rhetsa grows in rainforest and coastal thickets from sea level to an altitude of 200 m (660 ft), and is found in India, east to the Philippines and south to northern Australia. It occurs in the northern Kimberley in Western Australia, the northern coastal areas of the Northern Territory, Cape York Peninsula in Queensland and on Gabba and Moa Islands in the Torres Strait.
The people of Goa, the Konkan and Kanara coasts, and Coorg use the woody pericarp of the tiny fruits as a spice, particularly with seafood dishes. The spice is known as "teppal" in Konkani.
Zanthoxylum acanthopodium · Alianthus Like Prickly Ash · Common pricklyash · Winged Prickly Ash · Climbing Orange · Sichuan Pepper · Hercules' club · Zanthoxylum coco · African Satinwood · Zanthoxylum laetum · Chopi · Mastic Leaf Prickly Ash
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Zanthoxylum rhetsa 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.
