Cadaba aphylla | BotanAI

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Cadaba aphylla, photographed by Tony Rebelo — fig. a Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-02-13 / obs. 180592819

Cadaba aphylla, photographed by Mahomed Desai — fig. b Mahomed Desai, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 167571683

Cadaba aphylla, photographed by Di Turner — fig. c Di Turner, CC0 1.0 / obs. 166243481

Cadaba aphylla, photographed by Ian Webb — fig. d Ian Webb, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 144125421

Cadaba aphylla, photographed by douglaseustonbrown — fig. e douglaseustonbrown, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 119792543

Cadaba aphylla, photographed by Dave Brown — fig. f Dave Brown, CC0 1.0 / obs. 100528806

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: 03946938
Filed as: Cadaba aphylla (Thunb.) Wild
Det. by: J. Luber 2023-04-11
Collected: L. E. Taylor 1936-01-15
Origin: ZA
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 6 botanical countries

Native distribution of Cadaba aphylla, 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
Botswana	BOT	AFRICA
Cape Provinces	CPP
Free State	OFS
Namibia	NAM
Northern Provinces	TVL
Zimbabwe	ZIM

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 299 in flower of 502 examined

53%

30%

45%

67%

16%

40%

21%

85%

69%

80%

95%

Proportion of examined Cadaba aphylla in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	10	19	53%	32% to 73%
Feb	10	33	30%	17% to 47%
Mar	10	22	45%	27% to 65%
Apr	10	15	67%	42% to 85%
May	7	43	16%	8% to 30%
Jun	6	15	40%	20% to 64%
Jul	6	15	40%	20% to 64%
Aug	9	43	21%	11% to 35%
Sep	33	39	85%	70% to 93%
Oct	95	138	69%	61% to 76%
Nov	61	76	80%	70% to 88%
Dec	42	44	95%	85% to 99%

Peak flowering in Dec. Each bar is the share of Cadaba aphylla 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. 299 of 502 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 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 752 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	3.0 °C	6.5 °C	10.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	26.3 °C	29.5 °C	32.5 °C
Annual rainfall	161 mm	433 mm	614 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	7 mm	56 mm	96 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 752 research-grade observations of Cadaba aphylla 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 12 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.

Cadaba juncea (Burch.) Harv.
Cadaba juncea Szyszył.
Cadaba juncea Harv. ex Hook.f.
Cleome aphylla Thunb.
Cleome chrysogyna Gilg ex Heilbr.
Cleome intermedia Heilborn
Cleome longistyla Heilborn
Cleome pichinchensis Heilborn
Cleome sodiroi Gilg ex Heilbr.
Macromerum junceum Burch.
Schepperia aphylla (Thunb.) Eckl. & Zeyh.
Schepperia juncea (Burch.) DC.

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.