Trees of Miami Main

The Miami Tree Puzzle

Bayside Park, Miami. City and county parks are stocked with the most common trees growing in Miami, native and exotic, but may include occasional rare examples, such as this baobob tree (Adansonia digitata) growing in Bayside Park.

The trees of Miami are like its cosmopolitan human population. Some are treasured natives, but the majority have arrived from all over the world. Miamians have created urban landscapes evoking some idealic tropical paradise, along with many more mundane street and highway-scapes. We have used our native plants, common to the pine rockland and tropical hardwood hammock communities out of which we carved our neighborhoods. We have preserved a few of those forests, in county and state parks and reserves, as well as in Everglades National Park. We have also chosen flowering trees and palms from throughout the tropics. A few of these have become invasive exotic pests, threatening our original ecosystems, but most of the introductions are benign and beautiful.

Resources Available on this Website

City and county parks are good places to learn about trees. At Viscaya you can see a variety of trees used in its formal landscapes and can see native trees in the hammock on your way in to the main buildings.

This website is a resource to help you learn about these trees, preliminary to a book project now underway. It consists of three tree lists of the 496 most common tree species in the Miami metropolitan area. These lists have been sorted by scientific name, common name, and family.

On any of these lists, if you click on the scientific or common name you will be taken to a simple webpage for that species. That webpage lists the common name, scientific name and authority, family name, whether it is native or exotic, and the relatively commonness of the trees in 3 levels: 'Common' are the 165 most common species, representing trees you would see about 95% of the time; 'Infrequent' are the 165 species encountered less frequently, making up the next 4%; 'Rare' are the 165 species, including rare natives, encountered infrequently and making up the next 0.9%. Thus the species on this list cover about 99.9% of the trees that you would encounter. The complete list of tree species in Miami could well be twice that number, if the landscapes of collectors of rare palms and flowering shrubs and trees were included. To access the photographs click on the appropriate highlighted box on each list: or on the thumbnail image at the bottom of the species page.

We have also included a simple key of vegetative characters. This key works for 107 of the most common species in Miami, and is used in teaching biology and botany on our campus. So, the locations of trees in the key are on the FIU University Park campus.

Miami Tree Species Lists and Photographs

Coral Way, Miami. Many of the most common trees, designated by A on the lists, can be found along the streets of Miami. These are often drought-tolerant species native to the seasonally dry tropics.

Alphabetical by Scientific Name

Alphabetical by Plant Family

Alphabetical by Common Name

View by Flower Color (coming soon)

Miami Tree Puzzle Key

PDF file of a dichotomous key to the 110 most common trees in Miami and on the FIU Campus

FIU Campus. The University Park Campus of Florida International University has a diverse collection of native and exotic trees. Natives may be found in the Ecosystem Preserve, and natives and exotics grow throughout the campus, as adjacent to the Wertheim Conservatory

Defining a Tree

Where to See Trees in Miami

Use of these Photographs

The photographs may be used for any personal or educational purpose without contacting the creators. These are furnished with adequate resolution for a powerpoint presentation. If you need one of these images in sufficient resolution for publication, contact David Lee (leed@fiu.edu), for permission and to obtain the image.

Other Sources of Information about the Trees of Miami

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