Calling all Buckeye fans – by Steve Huddleston

If you’re looking for a small tree for a landscape featuring native Texas plants, or if you’re planting a pollinator garden, Mexican buckeye deserves consideration.

Native to southwestern, central, and western parts of our state, southern New Mexico and northeastern Mexico, it’s been found as far east as Dallas County. Yet it’s still not commonplace in our urban landscapes.

Although not a buckeye, the fruit bears a striking similarity. Photo from Oklahoma State University website. All images are clickable.

Although it’s not a true buckeye, it’s so called because of the similarly large capsules and seeds. The fruit follows showy rosy-pink spring flowers that display best in front of dark evergreen foliage such as tall Nellie R. Stevens hollies or eastern redcedar junipers. It’s also handsome when combined with fall foliage of Fire Dragon Shantung maples, Texas red oaks, or sumacs.

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What you’ll want to know…
• Common name: Mexican buckeye

• Scientific name: Ugnadia speciose, named after Baron Ferdinand von Ungnad, Austrian ambassador to Constantinople, who sent the first horse chestnut seeds to Vienna in 1576,

• Plant family: Sapindaceae, Soapberry family, along with western soapberry and golden raintree.

• Hardiness Zone: USDA Zones 7a-9b

Is it a shrub or a small tree? You make the call. Either way, it’s attractive as it starts to show its fall color. Photo by Steve Huddleston.

• Size: 8 to 12 ft. tall but can grow to 25 to 30 ft. tall. Spreading habit, usually growing wider than it is tall.

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Flowers are delightfully pink and fragrant. Photo by Laura Bonneau, US Fish and Wildlife Service.

• Flowers: Pink to rosy-pink in March and April. Fragrant. Attractive to bees, butterflies, and moths.

Fall color of Mexican buckeye at Fort Worth Botanic Garden. Photo by Steve Huddleston.

• Foliage: Deciduous, compound, 5 to 12 in. long. Fall color yellow.

• Bark: Light gray to brown, smooth on young branches, becoming fissured with age.

• Resistant to drought, cotton root rot, deer

• Seeds are poisonous to humans.

Posted by Steve Huddleston

About the Author

Steve Huddleston served as Senior Horticulturist at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden before his retirement. He then returned to the Garden as Public Relations Manager. He retired from that second position as well, but don’t expect to see him in the domino hall. Steve manages his own landscape design business which still gives him an opportunity to create beauty with plants. And, Grandpa Steve is going to be spending special family time in the future as well. And, of course, writing for e-gardens monthly.

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