Chrysophyllum cainito (star apple)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Chrysophyllum cainito, photographed by Maria Janeiro — fig. a Maria Janeiro, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-01 / obs. 192896499

Chrysophyllum cainito, photographed by Daniel van der Post — fig. b Daniel van der Post, CC0 1.0 / obs. 176784071

Chrysophyllum cainito, photographed by Lena Struwe — fig. c Lena Struwe, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 3664196

Chrysophyllum cainito, photographed by Diogo Luiz — fig. d Diogo Luiz, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 47361896

Chrysophyllum cainito, photographed by Giselle Blythe — fig. e Giselle Blythe, CC0 1.0 / obs. 13805461

Chrysophyllum cainito, photographed by Skjold Søndergaard — fig. f Skjold Søndergaard, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 188126935

Chrysophyllum cainito, photographed by Serenella Linares — fig. g Serenella Linares, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 174602300

Chrysophyllum cainito, photographed by Greg III Espera — fig. h Greg III Espera, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 104437210

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium: The New York Botanical Garden
Accession: 201255
Filed as: Chrysophyllum cainito L.
Det. by: C. R. Annable 1996-01-01
Collected: C. R. Annable 1996-01-31
Origin: US
The sheet: View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 1 botanical country

Native distribution of Chrysophyllum cainito, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Panamá	PAN	SOUTHERN AMERICA

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Where it actually grows measured, from 337 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	14.4 °C	21.4 °C	24.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	26.3 °C	30.2 °C	34.9 °C
Annual rainfall	958 mm	1,922 mm	3,898 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	19 mm	148 mm	532 mm

It is not found anywhere that gets close to freezing. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 337 research-grade observations of Chrysophyllum cainito that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.

Also published as 15 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Cainito pomiferum Tuss.
Chrysophyllum bonplandii Klotzsch ex Miq.
Chrysophyllum caeruleum Jacq.
Chrysophyllum cainito var. caeruleum Jacq.
Chrysophyllum cainito var. jamaicense Jacq.
Chrysophyllum cainito var. jamaicense (Jacq.) Bois
Chrysophyllum cainito var. martinicense Pierre
Chrysophyllum cainito var. pomiferum Pierre
Chrysophyllum cainito var. portoricense A.DC.
Chrysophyllum cainito var. typicum Stehlé
Chrysophyllum jamaicense Jacq.
Chrysophyllum maliforme L.
Chrysophyllum monopyrenum Spreng.
Chrysophyllum ottonis Klotzsch ex Miq.
Chrysophyllum sericeum Salisb.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.