Survives zone 8 through 9
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
Yellow-orange fruit — sweet, aromatic, guava-meets-lime. Among the hardiest useful Myrtaceae and the best bet in this group for a cool climate. Care: Winter protection — mulch, fleece, or a warm wall.
- Hardiness
- Zone 8–9
- Habit
- Shrub
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- Summer
- Mature size
- Evergreen tree 5–15 m; containerable when young
- Light
- Full sun to partial
- Soil pH
- 5.5–7.0 (acid–neutral; dislikes chalk)
- Environment
- Subtropical highland forest
- Native range
- Southern, central-western and north-eastern Brazil, extending into Paraguay, Uruguay and north-east Argentina — Atlantic Forest and cerrado
- Status
- Both wild and cultivated
- Years to fruit
- 3–5 yrs
- Growth speed
- Moderate
- Spacing
- 500 cm (197 in) apart — about 25 m² (269 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- Opposite, simple, elliptic to oblong with a pointed tip, 5–10 cm long, thin-textured and gland-dotted, aromatic when crushed.
- Root system
- Deep taproot when raised from seed, with spreading laterals — the largest-growing of the guabirobas here and correspondingly wind-firm once established. Container plants lose the taproot and need staking after planting out.
- Fruit description
- Smooth thin-skinned berry averaging around 6 g, green when young and yellow-orange when ripe, with juicy edible pulp that is sweet with a slight bitterness and only a few seeds. Eaten fresh and used for juice and liqueur.
- Propagation
- Seed, sown fresh. Cuttings are notoriously difficult — trials of annual sprouts recorded total mortality, with only stump shoots and winter stem fragments rooting at all (25–44%) — so seedlings and micropropagation are the practical routes.
- Pollination
- Self-fertile, better with a partner
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. Brazilian growers amend the planting hole with lime, wood ash, and well-rotted organic matter, then feed twice a year with compost, manure, or leaf litter; sources differ on whether it truly needs fertile soil or merely tolerates poor ground, so treat this as provisional.
How it spreads. Grows as a single-trunked tree rather than spreading; it does throw up basal shoots at the trunk base that growers routinely prune away to keep a clean tree form.
Growing tips. Prune in late winter to remove basal shoots and crowded interior branches. It is slow to bear (roughly 3-6 years from planting) and only lightly frost-tolerant (to about -3°C/27°F). This species is rarely cultivated outside its native range, so documented growing advice is thin compared to the other species here.
Grow journal
Sign in to keep a dated log of when you planted, bloomed and harvested this plant.