Cascabela ovata

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Cascabela ovata, photographed by Juan Carlos Pérez Magaña — fig. b Juan Carlos Pérez Magaña, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 137551450

Cascabela ovata, photographed by Luis F. Ramírez — fig. c Luis F. Ramírez, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 126589757

Cascabela ovata, photographed by Francisco Emilio Roldán Velasco — fig. d Francisco Emilio Roldán Velasco, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 121902836

Cascabela ovata, photographed by Gary Abner Garcia-Garcia — fig. g Gary Abner Garcia-Garcia, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 67360924

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 10 botanical countries

Native distribution of Cascabela ovata, 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
Mexico Central	MXC	NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Northeast	MXE
Mexico Northwest	MXN
Mexico Southeast	MXT
Mexico Southwest	MXS
Costa Rica	COS	SOUTHERN AMERICA
El Salvador	ELS
Guatemala	GUA
Honduras	HON
Nicaragua	NIC

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 790 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	10.0 °C	19.5 °C	23.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	29.1 °C	30.3 °C	35.1 °C
Annual rainfall	720 mm	1,095 mm	1,364 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	6 mm	18 mm	33 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 790 research-grade observations of Cascabela ovata 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 11 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.

Cascabela alliodora (Roem. & Schult.) Lippold
Cascabela plumerifolia (Benth.) Lippold
Cerbera alliodora Roem. & Schult.
Cerbera cuneifolia Sessé & Moc.
Cerbera cuneifolia Kunth
Cerbera ovata Cav.
Thevetia alliodora (Roem. & Schult.) L.Allorge
Thevetia cuneifolia (Kunth) A.DC.
Thevetia cuneifolia var. andrieuxii A.DC.
Thevetia ovata (Cav.) A.DC.
Thevetia plumeriifolia Benth.

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.