Boswellia sacra (frankincense)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 7 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 7 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.

Boswellia sacra, photographed by Thibaud Aronson — fig. a Thibaud Aronson, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2015-10-05 / obs. 117584739

Boswellia sacra, photographed by Kieran Dunnette — fig. b Kieran Dunnette, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 174393173

Boswellia sacra, photographed by dhfischer — fig. c dhfischer, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 157832465

Boswellia sacra, photographed by Christoph Moning — fig. h Christoph Moning, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 59976470

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 3 botanical countries

Native distribution of Boswellia sacra, 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
Oman	OMA	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Yemen	YEM
Somalia	SOM	AFRICA

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 47 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	11.6 °C	14.8 °C	20.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	28.9 °C	32.6 °C	40.5 °C
Annual rainfall	55 mm	109 mm	253 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	3 mm	6 mm	11 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 47 research-grade observations of Boswellia sacra 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 7 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.

Boswellia bhaw-dajiana Birdw.
Boswellia bhaw-dajiana var. serrulata Engl.
Boswellia carteri Birdw.
Boswellia carteri var. subintegra Engl.
Boswellia carteri var. undulatocrenata Engl.
Boswellia undulato-crenata Engl.
Boswellia undulato-crenata (Engl.) Engl.

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.