Plant · P-492

Strawberry Guava

Psidium cattleyanum

Strawberry Guava is an evergreen shrub or small tree from southern Brazil and Uruguay, grown for a small red or yellow fruit with an agreeable acid-sweet flavour, eaten fresh or turned into jelly, jam and drinks. It tolerates poorer, more alkaline soil and colder snaps than common guava, dying back to the roots after a hard freeze and resprouting rather than being killed outright. It also spreads aggressively by bird- and pig-carried seed into dense thickets that crowd out other plants, so where it is grown it needs to stay off watercourses and be harvested hard to limit seed.