Alyxia stellata (Maile)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Alyxia stellata, photographed by Kevin Faccenda — fig. a Kevin Faccenda, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-02-21 / obs. 180749484

Alyxia stellata, photographed by Eric Knight — fig. g Eric Knight, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 55559650

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 18 botanical countries

Native distribution of Alyxia stellata, 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
Caroline Is.	CRL	PACIFIC
Cook Is.	COO
Fiji	FIJ
Hawaii	HAW
Marianas	MRN
Marquesas	MRQ
New Caledonia	NWC
Niue	NUE
Pitcairn Is.	PIT
Samoa	SAM
Society Is.	SCI
Tonga	TON
Tuamotu	TUA
Tubuai Is.	TUB
Vanuatu	VAN
Wallis-Futuna Is.	WAL
Solomon Is.	SOL	ASIA-TROPICAL
Queensland	QLD	AUSTRALASIA

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 89 in flower of 319 examined

34%

30%

15%

21%

26%

44%

27%

33%

31%

50%

Proportion of examined Alyxia stellata in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	12	35	34%	21% to 51%
Feb	9	30	30%	17% to 48%
Mar	3	35	9%	3% to 22%
Apr	4	26	15%	6% to 34%
May	6	28	21%	10% to 40%
Jun	9	35	26%	14% to 42%
Jul	12	27	44%	28% to 63%
Aug	6	22	27%	13% to 48%
Sep	6	22	27%	13% to 48%
Oct	9	27	33%	19% to 52%
Nov	5	16	31%	14% to 56%
Dec	8	16	50%	28% to 72%

Peak flowering in Dec. Each bar is the share of Alyxia stellata 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. 89 of 319 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 406 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	9.7 °C	20.0 °C	21.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	20.5 °C	26.2 °C	27.8 °C
Annual rainfall	666 mm	1,297 mm	3,618 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	65 mm	210 mm	697 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 406 research-grade observations of Alyxia stellata 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 49 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.

Alyxia amoena A.C.Sm.
Alyxia brevipes (Baill.) Schltr.
Alyxia elliptica Cheeseman
Alyxia fosbergii J.Florence
Alyxia intermedia Vieill. ex Guillaumin
Alyxia latilimba M.L.Grant
Alyxia linearifolia A.C.Sm.
Alyxia myrtillifolia (A.Gray ex Hillebr.) H.Lév.
Alyxia obtusifolia R.Br.
Alyxia oliviformis Gaudich.
Alyxia oliviformis f. ampla H.St.John
Alyxia oliviformis f. angusta H.St.John
Alyxia oliviformis f. cuneata H.St.John
Alyxia oliviformis f. elliptica H.St.John
Alyxia oliviformis f. fusiformis H.St.John
Alyxia oliviformis f. lanceolata H.St.John
Alyxia oliviformis f. linearis H.St.John
Alyxia oliviformis f. myrtillifolia (A.Gray ex Hillebr.) H.St.John
Alyxia oliviformis f. obovata H.St.John
Alyxia oliviformis f. ovata (Hillebr.) H.St.John
Alyxia oliviformis f. retusa H.St.John
Alyxia oliviformis f. rotundata H.St.John
Alyxia oliviformis f. subacuta H.St.John
Alyxia oliviformis var. lanceolata Hillebr.

and 25 more.

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 ALST11. 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.