Acacia heterophylla (koaoha)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Acacia heterophylla, photographed by Kevin Faccenda — fig. a Kevin Faccenda, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-02 / obs. 204044781

Acacia heterophylla, photographed by Tyler Bishop — fig. b Tyler Bishop, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 198422641

Acacia heterophylla, photographed by lauralaska66 — fig. g lauralaska66, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 172724182

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 3 botanical countries

Native distribution of Acacia heterophylla, 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. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Mauritius	MAU	AFRICA
Réunion	REU
Hawaii	HAW	PACIFIC

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 87 in flower of 174 examined

79%

78%

75%

57%

48%

20%

32%

22%

33%

18%

13%

62%

Proportion of examined Acacia heterophylla in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	19	24	79%	60% to 91%
Feb	14	18	78%	55% to 91%
Mar	12	16	75%	51% to 90%
Apr	8	14	57%	33% to 79%
May	10	21	48%	28% to 68%
Jun	3	15	20%	7% to 45%
Jul	6	19	32%	15% to 54%
Aug	2	9	22%	6% to 55%
Sep	2	6	33%	10% to 70%
Oct	2	11	18%	5% to 48%
Nov	1	8	13%	2% to 47%
Dec	8	13	62%	36% to 82%

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Acacia heterophylla 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. 87 of 174 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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 133 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	3.1 °C	7.3 °C	10.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	15.0 °C	18.4 °C	21.4 °C
Annual rainfall	2,403 mm	2,985 mm	4,133 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	204 mm	297 mm	456 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 133 research-grade observations of Acacia heterophylla that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 20 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.

Acacia brevipes A.Cunn.
Acacia coa Walp.
Acacia heterophylla Hook. & Arn.
Acacia heterophylla var. latifolia Benth.
Acacia implexa var. brevipes (A.Cunn.) Domin
Acacia kauaiensis Hillebr.
Acacia koa A.Gray
Acacia koa var. hawaiiensis Rock
Acacia koa var. lanaiensis Rock
Acacia koa var. latifolia (Benth.) H.St.John
Acacia koa var. waianaeensis H.St.John
Acacia koa var. weimeae Hochr.
Acacia koaia Hillebr.
Acacia xiphoclada Baker
Feuilleea heterophylla (Lam.) Kuntze
Mimosa heterophylla Lam.
Racosperma heterophyllum (Lam.) Pedley
Racosperma kauaiense (Hillebr.) Pedley
Racosperma koa (A.Gray) Pedley
Racosperma xiphocladum (Baker) Pedley

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.
USDA PLANTS Database. common name, checklist symbol ACKO2. public domain. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.