Planting
Days to maturity
Seasonal yields
Sow indoors · Direct sow · Transplant outdoors
Loading
Plant · P-320
Moringa stenopetala
African moringa is a small deciduous tree grown for edible leaves, flowers, seedpods and young fruit, along with a seed oil used in soap and perfumery and seeds effective at clarifying drinking water. Its leaves are larger and milder-flavored than the more familiar Moringa oleifera. The catch is time: it needs roughly three years of uninterrupted frost-free growth before the first leaf harvest, so it only works as a planted tree in climates that never see a hard freeze.
Record at a glance
Vertical layer
Sub-CanopyKeep exploring
Discover more plants with shared forest layers or growing conditions.
Annona x atemoya
Atemoya is a cross between cherimoya and sugar apple grown for a large, pale, heart-shaped fruit whose custard-textured white pulp is scooped…
Sub-Canopy · USDA 10–11
Aegle marmelos
Bael is a slow-growing, spiny deciduous tree native to the dry and mixed deciduous forests of tropical Asia, from India across Nepal and…
Sub-Canopy · USDA 10–12
Musa acuminata
Despite the trunk-like stem, this is the tallest herb in the world - a giant rhizome that throws up disposable false stems made only of…
Sub-Canopy · USDA 10–11
Musa balbisiana
This is a wild, heavily seeded banana from eastern and south Asian forests, not a true plantain - most cooking plantains are hybrids that…
Sub-Canopy · USDA 8–11
Laurus nobilis
Dioecious and slow from seed with erratic germination so propagation is by half-ripe cuttings or air-layering. Stays where planted with no…
Sub-Canopy · USDA 8–10
Paubrasilia echinata
Brazilwood is a slow-growing thorny evergreen shrub or small tree in the legume family native to the Atlantic Forest of eastern Brazil. It…
Sub-Canopy · USDA 10–12
The deeper layer
Sow indoors · Direct sow · Transplant outdoors