Persea caerulea(Ruiz & Pav.) Mez

WFO wfo-0000465231 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 5 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 5 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.

Persea caerulea, photographed by Daniel A. Monsalve Ortiz
fig. a Daniel A. Monsalve Ortiz, CC BY 4.0 / 2019-04-27 / obs. 36869650
Persea caerulea, photographed by Jake Rehage
fig. b Jake Rehage, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 190683706
Persea caerulea, photographed by Eduardo A. Bolaños Vargas
fig. c Eduardo A. Bolaños Vargas, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 177602241
Persea caerulea, photographed by Eduardo Chacón Madrigal
fig. d Eduardo Chacón Madrigal, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 125148883
Persea caerulea, photographed by Eduardo Chacón Madrigal
fig. e Eduardo Chacón Madrigal, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 98430613
Persea caerulea, photographed by Jake Rehage
fig. f Jake Rehage, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 190683728
Persea caerulea, photographed by Eduardo A. Bolaños Vargas
fig. g Eduardo A. Bolaños Vargas, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 178588938
Persea caerulea, photographed by Eduardo Chacón Madrigal
fig. h Eduardo Chacón Madrigal, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 125148941

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
Smithsonian, US National Herbarium
Accession
US 2678046
Filed as
Persea caerulea (Ruiz & Pav.) Mez
Det. by
Cowan, R. S.
Collected
R. S. Cowan & T. R. Soderstrom 1962-03-15
Origin
GY
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC0 1.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. We link to the digitised sheet rather than rehosting it, because the holding institutions do not serve their images to third parties reliably and we are not going to show you a picture we cannot actually deliver. 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 sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 11 botanical countries

Regions where Persea caerulea is native: Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panamá, Peru, Venezuela, Venezuelan Antilles BoliviaColombiaCosta RicaEcuadorEl SalvadorHondurasNicaraguaPanamáPeruVenezuela Venezuelan Antilles
Native distribution of Persea caerulea, 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
Bolivia BOL SOUTHERN AMERICA
Colombia CLM
Costa Rica COS
Ecuador ECU
El Salvador ELS
Honduras HON
Nicaragua NIC
Panamá PAN
Peru PER
Venezuela VEN
Venezuelan Antilles VNA

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 61 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 10.3 °C 14.9 °C 17.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 20.6 °C 25.1 °C 27.9 °C
Annual rainfall 1,058 mm 2,705 mm 4,464 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 53 mm 248 mm 450 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 61 research-grade observations of Persea caerulea 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 11 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.

  • Laurus caerulea Ruiz & Pav.
  • Laurus coerulea Ruiz & Pav. ex Meisn.
  • Laurus laevigata Willd. ex Meisn.
  • Laurus pruinosa Willd. ex Nees
  • Laurus pyrifolia Willd. ex Nees
  • Laurus viburnoides Willd. ex Nees
  • Persea laevigata Kunth
  • Persea laevigata var. caerulea (Ruiz & Pav.) Meisn.
  • Persea lignitepala Lasser
  • Persea petiolaris Kunth
  • Persea skutchii C.K.Allen

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. 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.