If you were wandering through a nursery looking to add a plant to your landscape, coontie might not be the first one to catch your eye. Zamia pumila isn’t too exciting to look at, but it is an incredible plant with historical and ecological importance.
Coontie is a low-growing evergreen shrub that matures to 3’ tall and up to 5’ wide. They grow happily in sun or shade in most any pH. They are content in sandy soils or soils with organic matter. They are salt-tolerant and generally care-free. It’s the perfect plant for almost any scenario, unless you have overly curious toddlers or dogs. Coontie, like the sago palm, is a cycad. And like the sago, all parts of the coontie contain central nervous system toxins. They are also dioecious, which means that a coontie plant will only have either male cones that produce pollen or female cones that accept pollen and make seeds. The seeds of female coonties are bright orange in color and scatter on the ground underneath the plant.
It may be surprising to learn that the coontie was almost harvested out of existence in the Florida wild because of its edible properties. The Seminole, Alabama, and other Native American people found a way to use this highly toxic plant to make flour for bread. The roots were dug, chopped up, pounded into a pulp, and then washed to allow the toxins to leach out and the starch to settle. This made a paste which was then fermented for several days. Finally, the starch was sun-dried and used like cornmeal to make bread. I can’t help but wonder how many people were poisoned while experimenting with this plant! But it wasn’t the Seminoles who nearly eradicated our only Florida native Cycad. It was the European settlers in South Florida who began harvesting coontie and producing flour as an industry who were responsible for that. From the mid-1800s to early 1900s, factories in Florida processed ten tons or more of coontie every day and exported the flour. Coontie is a very slow-growing plant that can take a decade to get to harvestable size. So, it’s easy to see how it was almost driven to extinction.
Zamia pumila is also important ecologically. It is the only host plant for Atala butterfly larvae. This means that if there are no coonties then there are no Atala butterflies either. In fact, the Atala butterfly was feared extinct from the 1930s until it was rediscovered on a barrier island in Miami-Dade County in 1979. It’s now illegal to harvest coontie from the wild, but the landscaping trade propagates it and coontie is available for sale at just about any nursery you visit. This resurgence in population due to its adaptability as a landscape plant has led to a rebound in the Atala butterfly population too. Sadly, the butterfly doesn’t live as far north as Duval County, so you won’t be finding one in your backyard.
I recently learned about another fascinating facet of this plant. It uses something called thermogenesis for a pollination strategy. The coontie doesn’t make flowers with nectar to get bees to move its pollen from the male plants to the female plants. Instead, it uses heat to draw specific species of beetles as pollinators. The male cones on the coontie heat up as pollen starts being produced. This lures the beetles, who have infrared sensors on their antennae, to the cones to mate and feed. Then, the male cones start to cool off, timed perfectly for the female cones on totally separate plants to start heating up. The beetles, now covered in pollen, leave the cooled off male cones and go over to the warm female cones where they deposit pollen.
Nature is full of amazing details that aren’t always obvious. But when we take time to really learn about the plants and insects around us, we can gain a deeper appreciation for them and the natural areas where they are found. The next time you see a coontie at the garden center, share a bit of this knowledge with a fellow shopper and spread the fascination for our native flora.
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