Persea borbonia (redbay)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Persea borbonia, photographed by Michelle W. （鍾偉瑋） — fig. a Michelle W. （鍾偉瑋）, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-03-24 / obs. 184629989

Persea borbonia, photographed by Ryan Watson — fig. b Ryan Watson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 177868111

Persea borbonia, photographed by Lauren McLaurin — fig. c Lauren McLaurin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 175105457

Persea borbonia, photographed by Will Kuhn — fig. d Will Kuhn, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 168686150

Persea borbonia, photographed by Siddarth Machado — fig. e Siddarth Machado, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 160715553

Persea borbonia, photographed by Darren Oh — fig. f Darren Oh, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 147559718

Persea borbonia, photographed by Lauren Gillett — fig. g Lauren Gillett, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 121990551

Persea borbonia, photographed by Eric Knight — fig. h Eric Knight, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 108807684

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: 01206627
Filed as: Persea borbonia (L.) Spreng.
Det. by: D. E. Atha 2011-01-01
Collected: D. E. Atha 2010-10-06
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 9 botanical countries

Native distribution of Persea borbonia, 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
Alabama	ALA	NORTHERN AMERICA
Arkansas	ARK
Florida	FLA
Georgia	GEO
Louisiana	LOU
Mississippi	MSI
North Carolina	NCA
South Carolina	SCA
Texas	TEX

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 1,303 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	6.7 °C	10.0 °C	15.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	29.1 °C	30.6 °C	33.7 °C
Annual rainfall	922 mm	1,328 mm	1,594 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	158 mm	209 mm	326 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,303 research-grade observations of Persea borbonia 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 22 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.

Borbonia borbonia (L.) House
Borbonia carolinensis J.Presl
Borbonia littoralis (Small) House
Laurus borbonia L.
Laurus carolinensis Catesby ex Michx.
Laurus carolinensis Catesby
Laurus caroliniensis var. glabra Pursh
Laurus caroliniensis var. obtusa Pursh
Laurus elongata Salisb.
Laurus foetens Willd. ex Nees
Nothaphoebe borbonia (L.) Pax
Ocotea carolinensis Kostel.
Ocotea plumieri Kostel.
Persea borbonia f. borbonia
Persea borbonia var. borbonia
Persea carolinensis (Catesby ex Michx.) Nees
Persea carolinensis f. glabriuscula (Meisn.) Mez
Persea carolinensis var. glabriuscula Meisn.
Persea littoralis Small
Tamala borbonia (L.) Raf.
Tamala carolinensis Raf.
Tamala littoralis (Small) Small

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.