Coccoloba swartziiMeisn.

Swartz's pigeonplum

WFO wfo-0000613416 Accepted WFO 2026-06 5 photographs CC0

Plate 1 figs. a–e · 2 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 2 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Coccoloba swartzii, photographed by Jean-Paul Boerekamps
fig. a Jean-Paul Boerekamps, CC0 1.0 / 2021-05-05 / obs. 128821805

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.

Native range 17 botanical countries

Regions where Coccoloba swartzii is native: Mexico Southeast, Aruba, Bahamas, Belize, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Leeward Is., Netherlands Antilles, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Turks-Caicos Is., Venezuela, Venezuelan Antilles, Windward Is. Mexico SoutheastBelizeCubaDominican RepublicGuatemalaHondurasJamaicaNicaraguaPuerto RicoVenezuela ArubaBahamasLeeward Is.Netherlands AntillesTurks-Caicos Is.Venezuelan AntillesWindward Is.
Native distribution of Coccoloba swartzii, 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. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Aruba ARU SOUTHERN AMERICA
Bahamas BAH
Belize BLZ
Cuba CUB
Dominican Republic DOM
Guatemala GUA
Honduras HON
Jamaica JAM
Leeward Is. LEE
Netherlands Antilles NLA
Nicaragua NIC
Puerto Rico PUE
Turks-Caicos Is. TCI
Venezuela VEN
Venezuelan Antilles VNA
Windward Is. WIN
Mexico Southeast MXT NORTHERN 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 132 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 17.3 °C 23.4 °C 25.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 26.3 °C 27.9 °C 30.4 °C
Annual rainfall 556 mm 1,594 mm 2,477 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 55 mm 212 mm 359 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 132 research-grade observations of Coccoloba swartzii 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 6 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.

  • Coccoloba borinquensis Britton
  • Coccoloba corozalensis Lundell
  • Coccoloba gentlei Lundell
  • Coccoloba neglecta Fawc. & Rendle
  • Coccoloba swartzii f. pubescens R.A.Howard
  • Coccoloba swartzii var. portoricensis Meisn.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. 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.