Codiaeum variegatum (garden croton)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Codiaeum variegatum, photographed by Luke Padon — fig. a Luke Padon, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-30 / obs. 202290507

Codiaeum variegatum, photographed by Paolo Co — fig. b Paolo Co, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 190581076

Codiaeum variegatum, photographed by Kurt Miller — fig. c Kurt Miller, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 154751241

Codiaeum variegatum, photographed by Afsar Nayakkan — fig. d Afsar Nayakkan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 122906527

Codiaeum variegatum, photographed by Greg III Espera — fig. e Greg III Espera, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 83980828

Codiaeum variegatum, photographed by Don Loarie — fig. f Don Loarie, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 58878974

Codiaeum variegatum, photographed by Jennie Pistevos — fig. g Jennie Pistevos, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 148741337

Codiaeum variegatum, photographed by coenobita — fig. h coenobita, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 30917472

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: 204886
Filed as: Codiaeum variegatum (L.) Rumph. ex A.Juss.
Det. by: T. Flynn 2006-01-01
Collected: E. Albert 2004-01-19
Origin: FM
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 13 botanical countries

Native distribution of Codiaeum variegatum, 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. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Bismarck Archipelago	BIS	ASIA-TROPICAL
Borneo	BOR
Jawa	JAW
Lesser Sunda Is.	LSI
Maluku	MOL
New Guinea	NWG
Philippines	PHI
Solomon Is.	SOL
Sulawesi	SUL
Fiji	FIJ	PACIFIC
Santa Cruz Is.	SCZ
Vanuatu	VAN
Queensland	QLD	AUSTRALASIA

Not drawn on the map: Santa Cruz Is.. We hold no public-domain boundary for this region, so it is listed rather than guessed at.

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 1,984 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	11.3 °C	20.9 °C	24.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	26.0 °C	29.0 °C	35.1 °C
Annual rainfall	921 mm	1,918 mm	3,986 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	18 mm	166 mm	545 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 1,984 research-grade observations of Codiaeum variegatum 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 267 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.

Codiaeum albicans G.Nicholson
Codiaeum angustifolium G.Nicholson
Codiaeum angustifolium (Müll.Arg.) Anon.
Codiaeum angustifolium (E.J.Lowe & W.Howard) T.Moore & Mast.
Codiaeum angustissimum G.Nicholson
Codiaeum appendiculatum N.E.Br.
Codiaeum aucubifolium (Linden) G.Nicholson
Codiaeum aureolineatum N.E.Br.
Codiaeum aureomarmoratum Mottet
Codiaeum aureopunctatum Mottet
Codiaeum austinianum Mottet
Codiaeum bismarckii N.E.Br.
Codiaeum brageanum Mottet
Codiaeum broomfieldii Mottet
Codiaeum burtonii G.Nicholson
Codiaeum caudatum-tortile Mottet
Codiaeum chelsonii G.Nicholson
Codiaeum chrysophyllum G.Nicholson
Codiaeum chrysosticton Spreng.
Codiaeum chrysosticton var. angustifolium Rumph. ex Müll.Arg.
Codiaeum chrysosticton var. latifolium Rumph. ex Müll.Arg.
Codiaeum chrysosticton var. medium Rumph. ex Müll.Arg.
Codiaeum contortum Mottet
Codiaeum cooperi G.Nicholson

and 243 more.

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.