Boxelder

Appalachian-Blue Ridge forests

Arizona Mountains forests

Atlantic coastal pine barrens

Blue Mountains forests

California coastal sage and chaparral

Canadian Aspen forests and parklands

Central Pacific Northwest coastal forests

Central Tallgrass prairie

Central-Southern Cascades Forests

Appalachian mixed mesophytic forests

What it needs

Conditions

Light

Full sun

Water

Consistent moisture

Spacing

28 ft

Habit

Fast, weak-wooded deciduous tree, 30 to 50 feet tall and about as wide, with a short trunk that forks low into several heavy, often leaning limbs beneath a broad and characteristically untidy crown. Open-grown specimens are wider and lower than woodland ones; neither is symmetrical, and that irregularity is the species rather than a defect of the individual.

Care tips

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Plant a male tree if you plant one at all. Females produce both the seed that carpets the garden and the boxelder bugs that overwinter in your walls; males produce neither.

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Keep it well away from the house. The autumn wall-massing of boxelder bugs is the single most common complaint about this species, and distance solves it more reliably than anything else.

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Do not plant it where limb failure matters. The wood is weak and breaks in wind, ice and wet snow, so a driveway, patio or play area is the wrong place for it.

Lifecycle

Planting

Plant in spring or autumn in full sun; it will not tolerate shade. It takes an unusually wide range of soils including poor dry ones, clay, and ground near black walnut, and it handles periodic flooding well. Site it away from the house: the boxelder bugs that breed on female trees overwinter in wall cavities and window frames, which is the complaint people actually have about this species.

Transplanting

Transplants very easily at any size. Volunteers can be moved or, more often, removed - they appear readily wherever seed lands on bare soil.

Early growth

Very fast and rather formless. Prune early for a single leader if you want any structure at all; left alone it forks low and leans, and the resulting unions are what fail in wind and ice.

Maturity

Short-lived by maple standards. Expect brittle branches, storm damage, and heavy seed set on female trees. Prune in summer or early autumn rather than late winter, when maples bleed sap heavily.

Propagation

Effortless from seed, which is the practical problem rather than a convenience - samaras persist into winter and germinate freely. If you want the tree without the seedlings and without the boxelder bugs, plant a male; nurseries selling named cultivars usually propagate male clones for exactly that reason.

Native range

Native across 49 US states + 10 CA provinces.

Worldwide native range.

AHS heat range

1-11

Native ecoregions

Naturally belongs in 41 ecoregions - its native range crosses a state or province each one spans (not necessarily this exact habitat).

Appalachian-Blue Ridge forests

Arizona Mountains forests

Atlantic coastal pine barrens

Blue Mountains forests

California coastal sage and chaparral

Canadian Aspen forests and parklands

Central Pacific Northwest coastal forests

Central Tallgrass prairie

Central-Southern Cascades Forests

A dense, conical-to-narrow-pyramidal evergreen tree native to eastern and central North America, prized as a screening and foundation conifer. Flat, fan-like sprays of scale-like, aromatic yellow-green foliage clothe the tree from the ground up, and red-brown bark exfoliates on mature trunks. Wild trees can reach 40 to 60 feet but cultivated plants typically stay near 20 to 30 feet; small urn-shaped cones and dense evergreen cover make it valuable food and shelter for birds.

Climate notes

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Native across almost the whole of temperate North America - the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center gives the range as Maine to Manitoba, south to northern Florida and eastern Texas, plus a western arm from northern California to Colorado and south into Mexico. Concentrated on stream banks, floodplains and moist woods. POWO returned HTTP 403 throughout this batch, so the WGSRPD range was joined from that per-state native distribution rather than from Kew directly.

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Missouri Botanical Garden rates it USDA zones 2 to 10, which is close to the widest range of any tree in this catalog. Cold hardiness at the zone-2 end is the genuinely useful figure: very few shade trees survive that, and boxelder is one reason prairie shelterbelts exist.

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Its defining tolerance is disturbance. It takes flooding, drought, compacted and alkaline soil, poor dry ground and proximity to black walnut, and it establishes on raw sites where better trees fail outright. It will not take shade.

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The honest caveats are structural and domestic rather than ecological. The wood is weak and branches break under wind, ice and wet snow; the tree is short-lived; and female trees host boxelder bugs, which mass on warm walls in autumn and overwinter indoors. None of this is a reason to remove a healthy floodplain tree, and all of it is a reason not to plant one beside a house.

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Plotwright assigns an editorial AHS heat range of 1-11, reasoned from the cited Lady Bird Johnson range and Missouri Botanical Garden cultivation notes rather than from the USDA zones above. Maine, Manitoba and the prairie shelterbelts keep the floor at 1; the native reach into northern Florida, eastern Texas and Mexico, together with the record's drought and disturbance tolerance, leaves no documented ordinary-summer heat failure before the high end. The range stops at 11 because the Mexican arm includes upland country and does not establish a tropical lowland requirement. This is a conservative Plotwright interpretation, not a copied AHS rating.

Similar plants

Browse lateral options with similar roles, light needs, size, or native-range overlap; these are not filtered for a better climate fit.

Thuja occidentalis

American arborvitae

A medium-to-large native shade tree of central and eastern North America, reaching 50 to 80 feet with an ovate-rounded crown and large, asymmetric heart-shaped leaves. In June it carries pale-yellow, intensely fragrant flowers on pendulous cymes - each cluster hung from a distinctive strap-like leafy bract - that ripen into pea-sized nutlets. The fragrant June bloom is a premier nectar source: Missouri Botanical Garden lists it as attracting bees and butterflies, and the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center flags it as having special value to both native and honey bees.

The only native U.S. holly with both spiny green leaves and bright red berries - an upright, pyramidal, broadleaf evergreen tree that slowly matures to 15 to 30 feet in cultivation (to 50 feet in the wild). Thick, leathery, deep green leaves bear spiny marginal teeth, and pollinated female trees carry showy red-to-orange drupes that ripen in fall and persist through winter as bird food. This is the classic "Christmas holly" of wreaths and decorations.

A small-to-medium understory tree of dry, rocky eastern-North-American woods, named for its drooping clusters of papery, sac-like seed pods that resemble the fruit of hops. The birch-like, sharply-serrated leaves turn an undistinguished yellow in fall, and reddish-brown male catkins persist on the bare branches through winter. Also called ironwood for its extremely hard, dense wood; tough, low-maintenance, and drought-tolerant once established.

A tough, medium-sized native tree of the eastern and midwestern United States, grown as much for its showy edible orange fruit as for its distinctive thick, dark gray bark broken into rectangular blocks. Small urn-shaped white-to-greenish-yellow flowers open in May and June, and the sweet fruit ripens after frost. Largely dioecious - a female tree needs a male pollinizer nearby to set fruit - and notably drought- and walnut-tolerant once established.

Full sun / Part shade

A small native deciduous tree (or thicket-forming, suckering shrub) of eastern and central North America, grown for clouds of fragrant white 5-petaled flowers that open in March before the leaves and for the edible red plums that follow in early summer. It forms a broad, spreading crown with attractive dark reddish-brown twigs that sometimes carry thorny lateral branchlets. A documented larval host for swallowtails and other butterflies, with flowers of special value to native, bumble, and honey bees.