Abutilon sonneratianum

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Abutilon sonneratianum, photographed by Shaun Swanepoel — fig. b Shaun Swanepoel, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 190277439

Abutilon sonneratianum, photographed by Christina — fig. e Christina, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 128416269

Abutilon sonneratianum, photographed by David Rosenthal — fig. f David Rosenthal, CC0 1.0 / obs. 102032653

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 8 botanical countries

Native distribution of Abutilon sonneratianum, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Cape Provinces	CPP	AFRICA
Eswatini	SWZ
Free State	OFS
KwaZulu-Natal	NAT
Lesotho	LES
Mozambique	MOZ
Northern Provinces	TVL
Zimbabwe	ZIM

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 99 in flower of 147 examined

55%

50%

64%

75%

91%

71%

67%

80%

62%

74%

50%

67%

Proportion of examined Abutilon sonneratianum in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	6	11	55%	28% to 79%
Feb	7	14	50%	27% to 73%
Mar	7	11	64%	35% to 85%
Apr	15	20	75%	53% to 89%
May	10	11	91%	62% to 98%
Jun	5	7	71%	36% to 92%
Jul	8	12	67%	39% to 86%
Aug	8	10	80%	49% to 94%
Sep	8	13	62%	36% to 82%
Oct	14	19	74%	51% to 88%
Nov	5	10	50%	24% to 76%
Dec	6	9	67%	35% to 88%

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Abutilon sonneratianum observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 99 of 147 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 3 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Abutilon cistiflorum G.Don
Abutilon umtaliense Baker f.
Sida sonneratiana Cav.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.