Albizia lebbeck(L.) Benth.

woman's tongue

WFO wfo-0000184271 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Albizia lebbeck, photographed by Dinesh Valke
fig. a Dinesh Valke, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-03-08 / obs. 183891928

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.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium
The New York Botanical Garden
Accession
00917658
Filed as
Albizia lebbeck (L.) Benth.
Det. by
R. C. Barneby; J. W. Grimes 1991-01-01
Collected
G. G. Hatschbach 1993-11-07
Origin
BR
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 10 botanical countries

Regions where Albizia lebbeck is native: Andaman Is., Assam, Bangladesh, East Himalaya, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, West Himalaya AssamBangladeshEast HimalayaIndiaMyanmarNepalPakistanSri LankaWest Himalaya Andaman Is.
Native distribution of Albizia lebbeck, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Andaman Is. AND ASIA-TROPICAL
Assam ASS
Bangladesh BAN
East Himalaya EHM
India IND
Myanmar MYA
Nepal NEP
Pakistan PAK
Sri Lanka SRL
West Himalaya WHM

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 70 in flower of 147 examined

Proportion of examined Albizia lebbeck in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 4 18 22% 9% to 45%
Feb 2 6 33% 10% to 70%
Mar 11 16 69% 44% to 86%
Apr 20 32 63% 45% to 77%
May 8 12 67% 39% to 86%
Jun 3 12 25% 9% to 53%
Jul 0 5 0% 0% to 43%
Aug 3 8 38% 14% to 69%
Sep 6 7 86% 49% to 97%
Oct 4 7 57% 25% to 84%
Nov 6 13 46% 23% to 71%
Dec 3 11 27% 10% to 57%

Peak flowering in Sep. Each bar is the share of Albizia lebbeck 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. 70 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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 1,572 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 10.3 °C 16.1 °C 24.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 27.5 °C 30.5 °C 40.1 °C
Annual rainfall 636 mm 1,246 mm 2,241 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 4 mm 64 mm 267 mm

It is not found anywhere that gets close to freezing. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,572 research-grade observations of Albizia lebbeck 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 22 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 lebbeck (L.) Willd.
  • Acacia lebbek (L.) Willd.
  • Acacia seeressa Roxb. ex Steud.
  • Acacia sirissa (Roxb.) Jacques
  • Acacia speciosa (Jacq.) Willd.
  • Albizia latifolia Boivin
  • Albizia lebbeck var. leucoxylon Hassk.
  • Albizia lebbeck var. pubescens Haines
  • Albizia lebbeck var. pubescens Benth.
  • Albizia lebbeck var. rostrata Haines
  • Albizia speciosa (Jacq.) Benth. ex Müll.Berol.
  • Feuilleea lebbek (L.) Kuntze
  • Inga borbonica Hassk.
  • Inga leucoxylon Hassk.
  • Mimosa flexuosa Rottler ex Wight & Arn.
  • Mimosa lebbeck Blanco
  • Mimosa lebbeck L.
  • Mimosa lebbek L.
  • Mimosa seeressa Steud.
  • Mimosa sirissa Roxb.
  • Mimosa speciosa Jacq.
  • Pithecellobium splitgerberianum Miq.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. 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.