Aristolochia grandiflora (pelicanflower)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Aristolochia grandiflora, photographed by Jake Rehage — fig. a Jake Rehage, CC0 1.0 / 2021-03-28 / obs. 117973917

Aristolochia grandiflora, photographed by José Jair Texon Zanatta — fig. c José Jair Texon Zanatta, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 58791099

Aristolochia grandiflora, photographed by Diana Fuentes — fig. d Diana Fuentes, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 78049710

Aristolochia grandiflora, photographed by Peter Desmet — fig. e Peter Desmet, CC0 1.0 / obs. 5929806

Aristolochia grandiflora, photographed by Juan Cruzado Cortés — fig. f Juan Cruzado Cortés, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 2080550

Aristolochia grandiflora, photographed by Paul Prior — fig. g Paul Prior, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 2154146

Aristolochia grandiflora, photographed by kkacheltje — fig. h kkacheltje, CC0 1.0 / obs. 188395446

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 14 botanical countries

Native distribution of Aristolochia grandiflora, 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
Belize	BLZ	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Colombia	CLM
Costa Rica	COS
Ecuador	ECU
El Salvador	ELS
Guatemala	GUA
Honduras	HON
Jamaica	JAM
Nicaragua	NIC
Panamá	PAN
Mexico Gulf	MXG	NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Northeast	MXE
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.

Flowering 123 in flower of 139 examined

86%

92%

83%

94%

78%

89%

100%

83%

75%

94%

89%

100%

Proportion of examined Aristolochia grandiflora in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	12	14	86%	60% to 96%
Feb	11	12	92%	65% to 99%
Mar	10	12	83%	55% to 95%
Apr	16	17	94%	73% to 99%
May	7	9	78%	45% to 94%
Jun	8	9	89%	56% to 98%
Jul	9	9	100%	70% to 100%
Aug	10	12	83%	55% to 95%
Sep	9	12	75%	47% to 91%
Oct	16	17	94%	73% to 99%
Nov	8	9	89%	56% to 98%
Dec	7	7	100%	65% to 100%

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Aristolochia grandiflora 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. 123 of 139 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 525 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	11.5 °C	16.7 °C	23.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	23.0 °C	26.9 °C	32.6 °C
Annual rainfall	1,510 mm	2,804 mm	4,779 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	32 mm	214 mm	498 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 525 research-grade observations of Aristolochia grandiflora 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 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.

Aristolochia foetens Lindl.
Aristolochia gigantea Hook.
Aristolochia gigas Lindl.
Aristolochia gigas var. sturtevantii S.Watson
Aristolochia gorgona M.A.Blanco
Aristolochia grandiflora var. hookeri Duch.
Aristolochia pichinchensis Pfeifer
Aristolochia sturtevantii (S.Watson) Mottet
Howardia foetens Klotzsch
Howardia grandiflora (Sw.) Klotzsch

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.