Bowlesia incana (hoary bowlesia)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Bowlesia incana, photographed by Tim Gibson — fig. a Tim Gibson, CC0 1.0 / 2022-05-06 / obs. 195364728

Bowlesia incana, photographed by saltyhiker — fig. b saltyhiker, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 192561139

Bowlesia incana, photographed by Annika Lindqvist — fig. c Annika Lindqvist, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 190249339

Bowlesia incana, photographed by Ken-ichi Ueda — fig. d Ken-ichi Ueda, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 190238348

Bowlesia incana, photographed by Sue Ann Kendall — fig. e Sue Ann Kendall, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 187128053

Bowlesia incana, photographed by Diana Foreman — fig. f Diana Foreman, CC0 1.0 / obs. 185305162

Bowlesia incana, photographed by Adam J. Searcy — fig. g Adam J. Searcy, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 184765455

Bowlesia incana, photographed by John Michael — fig. h John Michael, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 182649186

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 16 botanical countries

Native distribution of Bowlesia incana, 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
Argentina Northeast	AGE	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Argentina Northwest	AGW
Argentina South	AGS
Brazil South	BZS
Brazil Southeast	BZL
Chile Central	CLC
Chile North	CLN
French Guiana	FRG
Paraguay	PAR
Uruguay	URU
Arizona	ARI	NORTHERN AMERICA
California	CAL
Mexico Northeast	MXE
Mexico Northwest	MXN
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 75 in flower of 211 examined

28%

13%

28%

54%

63%

57%

20%

Proportion of examined Bowlesia incana in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	5	18	28%	13% to 51%
Feb	5	38	13%	6% to 27%
Mar	16	57	28%	18% to 41%
Apr	28	52	54%	41% to 67%
May	10	16	63%	39% to 82%
Jun	1	3	too few examined
Jul	1	4	too few examined
Aug	4	7	57%	25% to 84%
Sep	1	2	too few examined
Oct	1	2	too few examined
Nov	1	2	too few examined
Dec	2	10	20%	6% to 51%

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Bowlesia incana 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. 75 of 211 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 5 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 1,984 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	2.4 °C	5.2 °C	8.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	27.4 °C	34.4 °C	39.2 °C
Annual rainfall	288 mm	912 mm	1,402 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	6 mm	168 mm	273 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 1,984 research-grade observations of Bowlesia incana 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.

Bowlesia asiatica Nasir
Bowlesia brevipes Phil. ex Reiche
Bowlesia geraniifolia Schltdl.
Bowlesia incana f. crassifolia Urb.
Bowlesia incana f. tenera (Spreng.) Urb.
Bowlesia nodiflora Presl ex DC.
Bowlesia rotundifolia Phil.
Bowlesia rubra Larrañaga
Bowlesia septentrionalis J.M.Coult. & Rose
Bowlesia tenera Spreng.

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.