Alternanthera caracasana (washerwoman)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Alternanthera caracasana, photographed by Tony Rebelo — fig. a Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-03-09 / obs. 182957407

Alternanthera caracasana, photographed by Tim Johnson — fig. b Tim Johnson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 159395723

Alternanthera caracasana, photographed by Eduardo Luis Beltrocco — fig. c Eduardo Luis Beltrocco, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 126145720

Alternanthera caracasana, photographed by Francisco Martínez González — fig. d Francisco Martínez González, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 124316177

Alternanthera caracasana, photographed by Ong Jyh Seng — fig. f Ong Jyh Seng, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 61685626

Alternanthera caracasana, photographed by CK2AZ — fig. g CK2AZ, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 45873868

Alternanthera caracasana, photographed by Francisco Farriols Sarabia — fig. h Francisco Farriols Sarabia, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 30171870

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: 00205569
Filed as: Alternanthera caracasana Kunth
Det. by: F. Jiménez Rodríguez 2007-01-01
Collected: I. Vandebroek 2006-03-10
Origin: DO
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 24 botanical countries

Native distribution of Alternanthera caracasana, 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
Argentina Northeast	AGE	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Argentina Northwest	AGW
Bolivia	BOL
Colombia	CLM
Costa Rica	COS
Cuba	CUB
Dominican Republic	DOM
Ecuador	ECU
Haiti	HAI
Honduras	HON
Jamaica	JAM
Leeward Is.	LEE
Nicaragua	NIC
Peru	PER
Puerto Rico	PUE
Trinidad-Tobago	TRT
Venezuela	VEN
Windward Is.	WIN
Mexico Central	MXC	NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Gulf	MXG
Mexico Northeast	MXE
Mexico Northwest	MXN
Mexico Southeast	MXT
Mexico Southwest	MXS

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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 589 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	0.5 °C	6.0 °C	14.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	20.0 °C	29.8 °C	35.3 °C
Annual rainfall	294 mm	755 mm	1,211 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	6 mm	37 mm	184 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 589 research-grade observations of Alternanthera caracasana 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.

Also published as 9 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.

Achyranthes peploides (Humb. & Bonpl. ex Roem. & Schult.) Britton
Alternanthera achyrantha var. dasyantha Seub.
Alternanthera achyrantha var. parvifolia Moq.
Alternanthera parvifolia (Moq.) Fawc. & Rendle
Alternanthera peploides (Humb. & Bonpl. ex Roem. & Schult.) Urb.
Alternanthera villiflora Scheele
Celosia humifusa Willd. ex Roem. & Schult.
Illecebrum peploides Humb. & Bonpl. ex Schult.
Telanthera caracasana (Kunth) Moq.

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.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. 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.