Hardiness zones
Sunset 12-16, 18-23
USDA 9-11

Landscape Use: Large seasonal accent shrub for splashes of bright summer color, quick screen

Form & Character: Partially evergreen to deciduous shrub (evergreen in mild winters), open, festive, warm, attracting, tropical to Mediterranean style.

Growth Habit: Vigorous, upright to sometimes sprawling, 10' or more in height with equal spread

Foliage/texture: Leaves twice pinnately compound, leaflets to 3/4" and less, new stems and foliage are reddish to purple, gray-green when mature, younger stems have soft and flexible spines, medium fine texture

Flowers & fruits: Flowers a brilliant mix of yellow, orange to red, clustered with long stamens, fruit orbicular and green turning to brown

Seasonal color: Festive warm flower colors in hot summer. Flowering most intense before the summer monsoon.

Temperature: Heat loving, usually freezes to ground in Phoenix each winter if left unprotected.

Light: Full sun, no shade.

Soil: Tolerant

Watering: Needs regular infrequent irrigations during the summer to look maintain vigor.

Pruning: Prune to any desired height in winter to control height and spread, even severely prune to the ground (it will recover nicely). Also, responds to some heading back in August with additional floral displays in September/October.

Propagation: Seed, sow seed fresh or acid scarify if older. Rarely reseeds in the urban landscape.

Disease and pests: White flies in late summer love it like I like chocolate truffles ice cream.

Additional comments: Red bird of paradise is a tremendous, large accent shrub that flourishes during in early summer when the Phoenix weather is hottest and other vegetation fades. It attracts hummingbirds and occasionally reseeds or spreads by root suckers in local urban landscape settings (not invasive though). There is a newer all yellow flowering cultivar from Desert Tree Farm Nursery in Phoenix, AZ called 'Phoenix Bird'. It has a somewhat slower growth rate and no red pigmentation in the leaves or stems. Othe Caesalpinina shrub species seen in Phoenix landscapes include C. gilliesii (bird-of-paradise bush) which has yellow flowers with protruding red stamens and grows to < 10'in height and C. mexicana (Mexican bird-of-paradise) which has lemon yellow flowers and grows slowly in an arborescent fashion to 15' to 20'.

The genus Caesalpinina is named after the Italian botanist Andreas Caesalpini (1519-1603). Red bird of paradise was first used as an ornamental in Europe and later across the mild regions of the United States including recently landscapes in the central Arizona desert. In 1705, botanical explorer Maria Sibylla first described how West Indian slave women of Dutch masters would attempt to end their pregnancies by ingesting the seeds from the fruit of C. pulcherimma.