The Seven Year Apple is an evergreen shrub or a small tree that is native to South Florida and the Caribbean. It is one of Florida’s most exceptional native, salt-tolerant plants. It will grow right up to the first dune near the ocean. The leaves are glossy, leathery, and clustered near the branch tips. Flowers are clusters of white, pink-tipped blossom that show in spring and early summer. They have a very sweet, heavy fragrance. The fruits are green then yellow then spotted brown and finally black. While humans are divided on the taste of the Seven Year Apple mockingbirds love the emetic seeds and leave hollowed out black fruit skins hanging on the tree.

The common name, Seven Year Apple, is an exaggeration of how long the fruit takes to ripen, 10 months. The tree itself is in fruit year round. It’s the larval hose of the Tantalus Sphinx moth. As a tree, the wood is dark brown or reddish brown, closed grained, very heavy and hard. The bark is mostly smooth and gray. It provides cordage that can be used to make rough cloth. The wood, particularly of the G. americana, has been used for spears, rifle stocks, shoe lasts, frames for sieves, barrel hoops, ammunition chests, boxes, packing cases, plows, tool handles, flooring boards, door frames and cabinetwork.