Boerhavia triquetraS.Watson

slender spiderling

WFO wfo-0000568117 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 5 observations

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.

Boerhavia triquetra, photographed by Bill Levine
fig. a Bill Levine, CC BY 4.0 / 2018-10-17 / obs. 26821635

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
02361437
Filed as
Boerhavia triquetra var. intermedia (M.E.Jones) Spellenb.
Det. by
R. W. Spellenberg 2008-01-01
Collected
C. Wright 1849
Origin
US
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. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. 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.

Native range 9 botanical countries

Regions where Boerhavia triquetra is native: Arizona, California, Mexico Central, Mexico Northeast, Mexico Northwest, Mexico Southwest, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas ArizonaCaliforniaMexico CentralMexico NortheastMexico NorthwestMexico SouthwestNevadaNew MexicoTexas
Native distribution of Boerhavia triquetra, 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
Arizona ARI NORTHERN AMERICA
California CAL
Mexico Central MXC
Mexico Northeast MXE
Mexico Northwest MXN
Mexico Southwest MXS
Nevada NEV
New Mexico NWM
Texas TEX

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 159 in flower of 176 examined

Proportion of examined Boerhavia triquetra in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 5 6 83% 44% to 97%
Feb 0 1 too few examined
Mar 0 0 too few examined
Apr 0 0 too few examined
May 0 0 too few examined
Jun 0 0 too few examined
Jul 0 0 too few examined
Aug 14 14 100% 78% to 100%
Sep 32 33 97% 85% to 99%
Oct 52 57 91% 81% to 96%
Nov 36 43 84% 70% to 92%
Dec 20 22 91% 72% to 97%

Peak flowering in Aug. Each bar is the share of Boerhavia triquetra 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. 159 of 176 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 6 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. 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 155 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 1.1 °C 9.0 °C 17.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 30.7 °C 35.2 °C 40.0 °C
Annual rainfall 108 mm 207 mm 409 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 1 mm 7 mm 25 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 155 research-grade observations of Boerhavia triquetra 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 3 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.

  • Boerhavia erecta var. intermedia (M.E.Jones) Kearney & Peebles
  • Boerhavia intermedia M.E.Jones
  • Boerhavia universitatis Standl.

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. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. 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.