Coleus barbatus (coleus)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Coleus barbatus, photographed by Dagmar Gleiss — fig. a Dagmar Gleiss, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-05-02 / obs. 194876625

Coleus barbatus, photographed by Shaun Swanepoel — fig. b Shaun Swanepoel, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 193221122

Coleus barbatus, photographed by Tony Rebelo — fig. c Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 189187509

Coleus barbatus, photographed by Duarte Frade — fig. d Duarte Frade, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 177325809

Coleus barbatus, photographed by Matthew Fainman — fig. g Matthew Fainman, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 172989932

Coleus barbatus, photographed by Dave Richardson — fig. h Dave Richardson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 169474663

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 20 botanical countries

Native distribution of Coleus barbatus, 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
Burundi	BUR	AFRICA
DR Congo	ZAI
Eritrea	ERI
Ethiopia	ETH
Kenya	KEN
Rwanda	RWA
Somalia	SOM
Sudan-South Sudan	SUD
Tanzania	TAN
Uganda	UGA
East Himalaya	EHM	ASIA-TROPICAL
India	IND
Nepal	NEP
Sri Lanka	SRL
Thailand	THA
West Himalaya	WHM
China South-Central	CHC	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Oman	OMA
Saudi Arabia	SAU
Yemen	YEM

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 291 in flower of 361 examined

86%

82%

81%

89%

88%

62%

70%

87%

88%

83%

89%

94%

Proportion of examined Coleus barbatus in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	24	28	86%	69% to 94%
Feb	9	11	82%	52% to 95%
Mar	13	16	81%	57% to 93%
Apr	59	66	89%	80% to 95%
May	44	50	88%	76% to 94%
Jun	43	69	62%	51% to 73%
Jul	31	44	70%	56% to 82%
Aug	20	23	87%	68% to 95%
Sep	14	16	88%	64% to 97%
Oct	10	12	83%	55% to 95%
Nov	8	9	89%	56% to 98%
Dec	16	17	94%	73% to 99%

Peak flowering in Dec. Each bar is the share of Coleus barbatus 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. 291 of 361 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 1,196 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	5.7 °C	10.3 °C	17.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	20.8 °C	24.9 °C	30.1 °C
Annual rainfall	584 mm	990 mm	2,346 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	24 mm	96 mm	282 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,196 research-grade observations of Coleus barbatus 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 18 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.

Coleus adolfi-friderici Perkins
Coleus coerulescens Gürke
Coleus forskalaei var. adoensis Briq.
Coleus grandis L.H.Cramer
Coleus kilimandschari Gürke
Coleus penzigii Dammann ex Baker
Coleus speciosus Baker f.
Coleus vestitus Baker
Ocimum asperum B.Heyne ex Roth
Orthosiphon asperus (B.Heyne ex Roth) Benth. ex Sweet
Plectranthus asper (B.Heyne ex Roth) Spreng.
Plectranthus barbatus Andrews
Plectranthus barbatus var. grandis (L.H.Cramer) Lukhoba & A.J.Paton
Plectranthus coerulescens (Gürke) R.H.Willemse
Plectranthus comosus Sims
Plectranthus grandis (L.H.Cramer) R.H.Willemse
Plectranthus kilimandschari (Gürke) H.I.Maass
Plectranthus pseudobarbatus J.K.Morton

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.
USDA PLANTS Database. common name, checklist symbol COBA10. public domain. 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.