Begonia maculataRaddi

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 5 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.

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.

Herbarium

The New York Botanical Garden

Accession

1183905

Filed as

Begonia maculata Raddi

Det. by

E. de L. Jacques 1996-01-01

Collected

B. D. Sucre 1971-11-18

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. 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.

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.

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 145 research-grade observations of Begonia maculata 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 Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.

How Begonia maculata grows, merged from four structured plant databases and a set of traits read from public-domain field guides. This is a record of documented characteristics, not care advice; each value keeps the source that reported it, and a value read from prose is tagged extracted so it is never mistaken for a measured fact.

USDA PLANTS, GIFT, Wikidata, EOL TraitBank (via Zenodo) and traits mined from USDA NRCS plant guides. per source (public domain, CC BY 4.0, CC0). Synced 2026-07-19. Merged per species: USDA PLANTS (public domain) and GIFT (CC BY 4.0) for structured growth traits, Wikidata (CC0) for fruit type and height, and EOL TraitBank via Zenodo (per record CC0 or CC BY). A fifth set is mined from public-domain USDA NRCS plant guides, each value carrying its verbatim quote. Values tagged extracted were read from prose, never a structured record; where sources disagree, every value is kept with its own source.

Kew records Begonia maculata as a useful plant in these 2 categories. This is a record that the species is used, drawn from a checklist of economically useful plants. It is not a recommendation, a dose, or a safety claim, and where a category reads Medicines or Poisons that is a use somebody documented, not advice from us.

• Environmental Uses
• Gene Sources

Kew World Checklist of Useful Plant Species. CC-BY 4.0. Synced 2026-07-18.

What Begonia maculata is called elsewhere, grouped by language. Recorded verbatim from open sources; where a language has more than one common name, both are shown.

English

Cane Begonia, Polka Dot Begonia

Chinese

斑叶竹节秋海棠, 竹节秋海棠

Russian

Бегония коралловая

Japanese

シラホシベゴニア

French

Bégonia Tamaya, Bégonia bambou

Dutch

Stippenbegonia

Polish

ukośnica plamista

Thai

บีโกเนียลายจุด

Swedish

forellbegonia, korallröd begonia

Finnish

pilkkubegonia

Slovak

begónia škvrnitá

Lithuanian

Koralinė begonija

Wikidata (P1843, CC0) + GBIF vernacular names. CC0 / per-source. Synced 2026-07-18. Wikidata is preferred where both sources give a name; GBIF supplements it. Joined on the World Flora Online identifier (Wikidata) or an exact GBIF species match.

Begonia maculata was named by Raddi, first published in Alc. Sp. Rett. Piant. Bras. xviii. Fis. (1820) 406 (1820). This is the nomenclatural record, who published the name and where, not a description of the plant.

Author

Raddi

Published in

Alc. Sp. Rett. Piant. Bras. xviii. Fis. (1820) 406, 1820

IPNI

105130-1

IPNI (International Plant Names Index). CC-BY 4.0. Synced 2026-07-18. The protologue citation and IPNI record, joined to this species on its World Flora Online identifier where IPNI carries one, else on the exact binomial with authorship.

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.

• Begonia aculeata Walp.
• Begonia albopicta Bull.
• Begonia argentea Van Houtte ex Klotzsch
• Begonia argenteoguttata Irmsch. ex hort.
• Begonia argyrostigma Fisch. ex Link & Otto
• Begonia maculata f. argentea (Klotzsch) Voss
• Begonia maculata var. albopicta (W.Bull) Fotsch
• Begonia maculata var. argentea (Van Houtte ex Klotzsch) A.DC.
• Begonia maculata var. wightii Fotsch
• Begonia punctata hort. ex Steud.
• Gaerdtia argentea Van Houtte ex Klotzsch
• Gaerdtia maculata (Raddi) Klotzsch

1. 01 World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
2. 02 iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
3. 03 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.