Argyreia nervosa (elephant creeper)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Argyreia nervosa, photographed by Raja bandi — fig. a Raja bandi, CC BY 4.0 / 2020-09-20 / obs. 96201054

Argyreia nervosa, photographed by S.MORE — fig. b S.MORE, CC0 1.0 / obs. 68011406

Argyreia nervosa, photographed by Giovanni Marques de Castro — fig. c Giovanni Marques de Castro, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 2788086

Argyreia nervosa, photographed by Siddarth Machado — fig. d Siddarth Machado, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 75508298

Argyreia nervosa, photographed by Ong Jyh Seng — fig. e Ong Jyh Seng, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 27342153

Argyreia nervosa, photographed by Dinesh Valke — fig. g Dinesh Valke, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 130639375

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 5 botanical countries

Native distribution of Argyreia nervosa, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Assam	ASS	ASIA-TROPICAL
Bangladesh	BAN
India	IND
Myanmar	MYA
Nepal	NEP

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 221 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	10.4 °C	16.1 °C	24.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	26.6 °C	30.6 °C	41.0 °C
Annual rainfall	746 mm	1,201 mm	3,045 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	5 mm	55 mm	497 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 221 research-grade observations of Argyreia nervosa 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 10 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.

Argyreia speciosa (L.f.) Sweet
Batatas betacea Lindl.
Convolvulus nervosus Burm.f.
Convolvulus speciosus L.f.
Ipomoea nervosa (Burm.f.) J.R.I.Wood & Scotland
Ipomoea speciosa (L.f.) Pers.
Ipomoea valerii Standl. & L.O.Williams
Lettsomia nervosa (Burm.f.) Roxb.
Rivea nervosa (Burm.f.) Hallier f.
Samudra speciosa Raf.

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.