Metopium brownei (Black poisonwood)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Metopium brownei, photographed by Miguel Grageda — fig. a Miguel Grageda, CC BY 4.0 / 2020-07-26 / obs. 86626333

Metopium brownei, photographed by Eric Knight — fig. b Eric Knight, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 63275603

Metopium brownei, photographed by Leonel Roget — fig. c Leonel Roget, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 58793659

Metopium brownei, photographed by Luis Mora — fig. d Luis Mora, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 19546169

Metopium brownei, photographed by Juan Carlos A. Fierro — fig. e Juan Carlos A. Fierro, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 200538484

Metopium brownei, photographed by José Gerardo Velasco — fig. g José Gerardo Velasco, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 177008980

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 11 botanical countries

Native distribution of Metopium brownei, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Belize	BLZ	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Cuba	CUB
Dominican Republic	DOM
Guatemala	GUA
Haiti	HAI
Honduras	HON
Jamaica	JAM
Netherlands Antilles	NLA
Southwest Caribbean	SWC
Mexico Gulf	MXG	NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Southeast	MXT

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 320 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	18.7 °C	22.2 °C	24.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	28.2 °C	29.6 °C	34.1 °C
Annual rainfall	685 mm	1,367 mm	1,891 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	55 mm	146 mm	172 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 320 research-grade observations of Metopium brownei 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 7 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.

Cotinus metopium (L.) M.Gómez
Metopium brownei var. brachycarpum Urb.
Metopium linnaei Engl.
Metopium metopium (L.) Small
Rhus metopia St.-Lag.
Rhus metopium L.
Terebinthus brownii Jacq.

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.