Aphelandra nitidaNees & Mart.

WFO wfo-0000540226 Accepted WFO 2026-06 5 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–e · 2 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 2 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Aphelandra nitida, photographed by B. Phalan
fig. a B. Phalan, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-10-05 / obs. 165224207
Aphelandra nitida, photographed by B. Phalan
fig. b B. Phalan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 56192608
Aphelandra nitida, photographed by B. Phalan
fig. c B. Phalan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 165224161
Aphelandra nitida, photographed by B. Phalan
fig. d B. Phalan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 56192623
Aphelandra nitida, photographed by B. Phalan
fig. e B. Phalan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 165224184

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
01198260
Filed as
Aphelandra nitida Nees & Mart.
Det. by
S. R. Profíce 2008-01-01
Collected
W. W. Thomas 2003-07-26
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. We link to the digitised sheet rather than rehosting it, because the holding institutions do not serve their images to third parties reliably and we are not going to show you a picture we cannot actually deliver. 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 sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 2 botanical countries

Regions where Aphelandra nitida is native: Brazil Northeast, Brazil Southeast Brazil NortheastBrazil Southeast
Native distribution of Aphelandra nitida, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Brazil Northeast BZE SOUTHERN AMERICA
Brazil Southeast BZL

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.

Also published as 4 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.

  • Geissomeria cestrifolia Nees
  • Geissomeria macrophylla Nees
  • Geissomeria nitida (Nees & Mart.) Nees
  • Justicia eriandra Salzm. ex Nees

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. 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.