Begonia urticae

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Begonia urticae, photographed by desertnaturalist — fig. b desertnaturalist, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 201703077

Begonia urticae, photographed by Kai Squires — fig. d Kai Squires, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 135870849

Begonia urticae, photographed by GERMAN LEONEL SARMIENTO CRUZ — fig. e GERMAN LEONEL SARMIENTO CRUZ, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 105387723

Begonia urticae, photographed by Steven Bodzin — fig. f Steven Bodzin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 46279440

Begonia urticae, photographed by tlaloc27 — fig. g tlaloc27, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 43980666

Begonia urticae, photographed by Tom Kennedy — fig. h Tom Kennedy, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 170448481

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: 02679574
Filed as: Begonia urticae L.fil.
Det. by: P. Moonlight 2017-01-01
Collected: not recorded
Origin: not recorded
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 6 botanical countries

Native distribution of Begonia urticae, 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
Colombia	CLM	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Costa Rica	COS
Ecuador	ECU
Panamá	PAN
Peru	PER
Venezuela	VEN

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 361 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	4.8 °C	7.8 °C	12.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	13.9 °C	17.2 °C	20.8 °C
Annual rainfall	1,248 mm	2,738 mm	4,830 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	158 mm	386 mm	883 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 361 research-grade observations of Begonia urticae 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 32 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.

Begonia antioquensis (A.DC.) Rusby
Begonia chiriquensis Standl.
Begonia coccinea Ruiz ex Klotzsch
Begonia columnaris Benth.
Begonia columnaris var. columnaris
Begonia columnaris var. glabra (Klotzsch ex Klotzsch) L.B.Sm. & B.G.Schub.
Begonia cucullata Ruiz ex Klotzsch
Begonia monticola C.DC.
Begonia torresii Standl.
Begonia trachyptera Benth.
Begonia urticae var. hispida A.DC. ex Standl.
Begonia urticae var. retusa L.B.Sm. & B.G.Schub.
Begonia urticifolia F.Dietr.
Begonia urticifolia Sm.
Casparya antioquensis A.DC.
Casparya coccinea Klotzsch ex Klotzsch
Casparya coccinea Klotzsch
Casparya columnaris (Benth.) A.DC.
Casparya columnaris var. columnaris
Casparya columnaris var. glabra (Klotzsch ex Klotzsch) A.DC.
Casparya trachyptera (Benth.) A.DC.
Casparya urticae (L.f.) A.DC.
Casparya urticae var. hispida A.DC.
Casparya urticae var. urticae

and 8 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.
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.