Photo: Mason Brock (Masebrock) — Public domain · source
Survives zone 6 through 9
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
A smaller-flowered, smaller-fruited understory relative of A. triloba found from Virginia to Texas — its cylindrical fruit reaches only about 2.5-7.5cm (1-3 inches), a fraction of common pawpaw size, so it is not grown for commercial fruit production even though the fruit itself is edible and sweet. ⚠ As with all pawpaws, eat the flesh only — skin and seeds concentrate annonacin and are not food.
- Hardiness
- Zone 6–9
- Habit
- Shrub
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- Sept–Oct
- Mature size
- Understory shrub, most plants 0.3–1 m, reaching 2–2.5 m and occasionally a small tree to 4–5 m on good sheltered ground
- Light
- Partial to full sun
- Soil pH
- 5.5–7.0 (slightly acid)
- Environment
- Temperate
- Native range
- Southeastern Coastal Plain from southern Virginia west to eastern Texas, including the Florida Panhandle and peninsula south to about Highlands County — found in floodplain forests, hardwood hammocks and moist sandy or loamy woods, usually as an understory plant.
- Status
- Wild
- Years to fruit
- 3–5 yrs grafted, 4–8 from seed
- Growth speed
- Slow
- Spacing
- 180 cm (71 in) apart — about 3.2 m² (35 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- Alternate, simple, oblanceolate to oblong or obovate leaves, roughly 7.5-15cm (3-6 inches, occasionally to 20cm) long and 2.5-7.5cm wide, dark green and smooth-textured with entire margins and hairs along the veins.
- Root system
- Long taproot established early in the plant's life, as in other Asimina species — makes transplanting difficult.
- Fruit description
- Cylindrical, yellow-green fruit ripening to dark brown, only 2.5-7.5cm (1-3 inches) long — much smaller than A. triloba fruit. The pulp is edible and sweet but the small size means it is rarely grown for fruit production and is mostly eaten by birds and small mammals first.
- Propagation
- Propagated from seed (which needs cold stratification) or by root cuttings and layering. As in other Asimina species it develops a long taproot early, so transplanting established plants is difficult and root disturbance should be minimized.
- Pollination
- Maroon flowers mimic the color and faint scent of fermenting fruit or carrion to attract small flies and beetles, which carry out pollination — genus-wide, Asimina relies on flies and beetles rather than bees.
The edible parts listed above are a starting point, not a field guide. Identify a plant with certainty — ideally against a local authority — before eating any part of it, and read the full disclaimer. Spotted something wrong? Report it.
Growing guide
Fertilizing. Occupies moist, acidic to neutral sandy or loamy woodland soil — richer and moister sites than the dry Florida scrub pawpaws — but like the rest of the genus does not need or want heavy feeding.
How it spreads. Grows as a single- to few-stemmed understory shrub or small tree. No rhizomatous or root-suckering, thicket-forming habit is documented for this species the way it is for A. triloba.
Growing tips. Hardy to roughly USDA zones 7-9/10 per horticultural sources — considerably less cold-hardy than A. triloba, which survives to zone 4. It hybridizes readily with A. triloba where their ranges overlap, producing the hybrid Asimina x piedmontana.
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