Plant Encyclopedia

Search and identify 1,000+ plants, flowers, trees, and succulents — with care, light, water, and how to tell them apart.

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Silk Floss Tree

The silk floss tree is a striking subtropical tree with a bulging, thorn-studded green trunk and large pink-and-cream hibiscus-like flowers in autumn. Its seed pods burst to release silky white fibers, giving the tree its name.

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Silk Oak

The silk oak is a fast-growing Australian tree with fern-like silvery foliage and showy golden-orange, comb-shaped flowers in spring. It is widely grown for shade, timber and ornament, but can be weedy outside its range.

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Mimosa Tree

A fast-growing ornamental tree with feathery fern-like leaves and fluffy pink powderpuff flowers, widely planted but invasive across the southern United States.

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Mulberry Tree

A fast-growing deciduous tree producing abundant blackberry-like fruit. White mulberry is also famous as the sole food of silkworms.

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Firewheel Tree

The firewheel tree is an Australian rainforest tree named for its striking red-and-orange flowers arranged in spoke-like wheels. It has glossy lobed foliage and makes a handsome ornamental and street tree.

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Katsura Tree

A graceful Asian shade tree with heart-shaped blue-green leaves that turn gold and apricot in fall, famously releasing a sweet scent of burnt sugar or cotton candy.

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Snowbell Tree

A graceful small tree that hangs with rows of fragrant, bell-shaped white flowers in late spring. Its horizontal branching shows the dangling blooms off to perfection.

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Quince Tree

A small deciduous tree bearing fragrant, golden, pear-shaped fruit, also valued for its lovely white-to-pink spring blossom and twisted, gnarled form.

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Mangosteen Tree

A slow-growing tropical evergreen known for its dark purple fruit with white segments. Notoriously demanding, it needs constant warmth and humidity and takes many years to fruit.

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Pear Tree

The pear tree is a deciduous fruit tree grown for its abundant white spring blossom and glossy foliage. European pears (Pyrus communis) are long-lived ornamental and orchard trees.

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Plumeria Tree

A small tropical tree beloved for its intensely fragrant, waxy flowers used in Hawaiian leis. Plumeria blooms in shades of white, yellow, pink, and red atop thick, sculptural branches.

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Hydrangea Tree

The hydrangea tree is a panicle hydrangea trained to a single trunk, topped with large cone-shaped clusters of white flowers that age to pink in late summer. It is the hardiest and most sun-tolerant of the hydrangeas.

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Camellia Tree

The camellia is a glossy-leaved evergreen shrub or small tree bearing large, showy rose-like flowers in shades of red, pink and white during fall, winter and spring. It is a classic shade-garden ornamental.

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Fringe Tree

A small native tree or large shrub that produces airy, cloud-like clusters of fragrant, fringe-like white flowers in late spring. Its feathery blooms give it the name old man's beard.

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Tree Aeonium

A branching, shrubby succulent that holds glossy leaf rosettes atop bare woody stems. Popular dark cultivars like 'Zwartkop' turn nearly black in strong sun.

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Tree Ivy

Tree ivy is a rare bigeneric hybrid between Japanese aralia and English ivy, combining glossy, ivy-shaped leaves with an upright, shrubby stem. It is an easy, shade-tolerant foliage plant for cool rooms and shady gardens.

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Wisteria Tree

A wisteria tree is a wisteria vine trained and pruned into a small free-standing tree form, prized for cascading clusters of fragrant purple-blue spring flowers. It is vigorous and requires regular pruning.

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Smoke Tree

A deciduous shrub or small tree named for the airy, smoke-like plumes of fading flower stalks that envelop it in summer. Many cultivars also feature striking purple foliage.

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Sausage Tree

The sausage tree is an African tree famous for its enormous, heavy, sausage-shaped fruits dangling on long stalks, and its dark maroon, bat-pollinated flowers. It is a striking specimen of savanna and riverbank landscapes.

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Rubber Tree

The rubber tree is a striking indoor tree with large, thick, glossy leaves that can be deep green or burgundy. It is easy to grow and can become an impressive floor plant several feet tall.

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Persimmon Tree

A deciduous fruit tree grown for its glossy orange fruit that ripens in autumn and clings to bare branches like ornaments, and for its vivid fall foliage.

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Olive Tree

The olive is a long-lived evergreen Mediterranean tree, a fruiting tree cultivated for thousands of years. Gnarled, silvery and remarkably drought-hardy, it is also a popular ornamental and container plant.

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Nectarine Tree

A smooth-skinned variety of peach, the nectarine produces juicy fruit on a compact deciduous tree. It is genetically nearly identical to the peach, differing mainly in its fuzz-free skin.

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Lychee Tree

A subtropical evergreen tree producing clusters of red, knobbly-skinned fruit. It is a beautiful but demanding tree that needs precise climate conditions to fruit.

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