Native Edible Plants: Cocoplum

Coco plum, now used as an ornamental hedge, was once a food staple for the Seminole Indians and Ais Tribes. As hunters and gatherers they also gathered sea oats, sea grapes and palm berries. Coco plum is native to coastal areas of Southern Florida, the Bahamas through the Caribbean. It is also found along the coasts of Mexico, through Central America and South America, to Ecuador and Northern Brazil. Due to landscaping practices the plant can be found inland and thrives under direct sun.

I have eaten coco plum many times, it has good water content and about five fruits can keep you full for about an hour and a half. They taste like an extremely bland banana and the skin can have a dry taste similar to the skin of a nut. They are really good chilled and have a rather large pit in relation to the fruit.

Best when fruit is full, firm and at a dark purple almost black color. A word of caution, if you see the coco plum in the wild, it’s probably pretty safe to eat, but in landscape settings you need to be careful because the plant may have recently been treated with pesticide or fungicide.

If you are in a survival situation the coco plum can get you by, however it is not always in season, tends to fruit in early summer. In the wild you can see both green tip and red tip coco plum. In ornamental landscape settings the red tip is used more often.

For low plantings there is now a horizontal coco plum available which is ideal for parking lots as it stays low and does not block a drivers line of sight.