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birchleaf buckthorn
Frangula betulifolia
Frangula betulifolia, the birchleaf buckthorn, is a shrub or small tree in the buckthorn family, Rhamnaceae. It is native in northern Mexico in the Sierra Madre Occidental cordillera, and mountainous, desert regions of the Southwestern United States of Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and far west Texas; besides being found in Sonora, Chihuahua and Durango of the Occidental cordillera, a large species locale occurs to the east in Nuevo León.
Frangula betulifolia has large ovate leaves, and can grow to be a small tree from 3-10m tall. Blooms in spring, May–June, followed by black-purple fruits in fall. The inner bark was chewed by Native Americans for medicinal purposes.
From the article Frangula betulifolia on Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), quoted section by section
Range & habitat
The core range of the birchleaf buckthorn is the northern Sierra Madre Occidental cordillera, from central Durango, north to west-southwest Chihuahua, and eastern Sonora; it also ranges just north at the Arizona-New Mexico, Sonora-Chihuahua borders, a region called the Madrean Sky Islands, of sky island mountain ranges. Other medium-sized range locales occur at: central, southwest New Mexico, (an extension east from the Mogollon Rim–White Mountains of the Arizona transition zone); the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River with the range extending upriver into the Canyon Lands of southeast Utah; western Texas; and southern Nuevo León. Other states with more minor-sized locales are Nevada, Coahuila, and Tamaulipas.
Wikipedia: “Range”
At the table
Various songbirds and small mammals consume the berries, which are edible but unpalatable, and deer and bighorn sheep browse the foliage.
Wikipedia: “Uses”
Where it lives
Recorded sightings
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geo-referenced records in GBIF, from museums, herbaria and field observers.
Drag the globe to turn it. Dots are where records exist, not a range map; darker means more records.
In the stacks
Searching the stacks…
Every page naming Frangula betulifolia in the Biodiversity Heritage Library →
This page is assembled live from iNaturalist, GBIF, Wikipedia, the Source Library and the Internet Archive. It is not yet part of the hand-edited codex. iNaturalist taxon 163070.