Nyssa sylvaticaMarshall

Black Tupelo

WFO wfo-0000252606 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Nyssa sylvatica, photographed by Leila Dasher
fig. a Leila Dasher, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-03 / obs. 203101539
Nyssa sylvatica, photographed by Rebecca Gimenez Husted
fig. b Rebecca Gimenez Husted, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 193710176
Nyssa sylvatica, photographed by Ashwin Srinivasan
fig. c Ashwin Srinivasan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 197718913
Nyssa sylvatica, photographed by Siddarth Machado
fig. d Siddarth Machado, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 187926671
Nyssa sylvatica, photographed by lejones417
fig. e lejones417, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 198893162
Nyssa sylvatica, photographed by Zac Peterson
fig. f Zac Peterson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 191880133
Nyssa sylvatica, photographed by Rochelle Davis
fig. g Rochelle Davis, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 165188040
Nyssa sylvatica, photographed by Sam Droege
fig. h Sam Droege, CC0 1.0 / obs. 166666453

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.

Confused withby our own model

These are not lookalikes we guessed at. Each one is a species our identification model genuinely mistook for this plant, and how many times. The error rate is published.

Flowering n = 151 observations

Peak flowering in May, from 151 community-annotated observations worldwide. This is a global aggregate, not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres, and citizen-science records cluster near cities, at weekends, and in spring. Where a species has fewer than 30 annotated records we do not draw this chart at all.

Also published as 14 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.

  • Nyssa canadensis Poir.
  • Nyssa caroliniana Poir.
  • Nyssa ciliata Raf.
  • Nyssa integrifolia Aiton
  • Nyssa integrifolia var. glauca Pers.
  • Nyssa multiflora Elliott
  • Nyssa multiflora Wangenh.
  • Nyssa multiflora var. sylvatica (Marshall) S.Watson
  • Nyssa sylvatica var. aquatica Sarg.
  • Nyssa sylvatica var. caroliniana (Poir.) Fernald
  • Nyssa sylvatica var. dilatata Fernald
  • Nyssa sylvatica var. sylvatica
  • Nyssa sylvatica var. typica Fernald
  • Nyssa villosa Michx.

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.

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