Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations
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
- Smithsonian, US National Herbarium
- Accession
- US 3291554
- Filed as
- Commelina africana L.
- Det. by
- Faden, Robert B., (US), Smithsonian Institution - National Museum of Natural History (UNITED STATES)
- Collected
- S. Porembski & N. Biedinger 1993-12-03
- Origin
- RW
- The sheet
- View the digitised specimen (CC0 1.0)
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 47 botanical countries
| Region | TDWG code | Continent |
|---|---|---|
| Angola | ANG | AFRICA |
| Benin | BEN | |
| Botswana | BOT | |
| Burkina | BKN | |
| Burundi | BUR | |
| Cameroon | CMN | |
| Cape Provinces | CPP | |
| Cape Verde | CVI | |
| Caprivi Strip | CPV | |
| Central African Republic | CAF | |
| Comoros | COM | |
| Congo | CON | |
| Djibouti | DJI | |
| DR Congo | ZAI | |
| Equatorial Guinea | EQG | |
| Eritrea | ERI | |
| Eswatini | SWZ | |
| Ethiopia | ETH | |
| Free State | OFS | |
| Ghana | GHA | |
| Guinea | GUI | |
| Guinea-Bissau | GNB | |
| Gulf of Guinea Is. | GGI | |
| Ivory Coast | IVO | |
| Kenya | KEN | |
| KwaZulu-Natal | NAT | |
| Lesotho | LES | |
| Liberia | LBR | |
| Madagascar | MDG | |
| Malawi | MLW | |
| Mozambique | MOZ | |
| Namibia | NAM | |
| Nigeria | NGA | |
| Northern Provinces | TVL | |
| Réunion | REU | |
| Rwanda | RWA | |
| Senegal | SEN | |
| Sierra Leone | SIE | |
| Somalia | SOM | |
| Sudan-South Sudan | SUD | |
| Tanzania | TAN | |
| Togo | TOG | |
| Uganda | UGA | |
| Zambia | ZAM | |
| Zimbabwe | ZIM | |
| Saudi Arabia | SAU | ASIA-TEMPERATE |
| 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 304 in flower of 355 examined
Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Commelina africana 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. 304 of 355 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. One month has fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for it. 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 2,006 observations
| Condition | 5th percentile | Median | 95th percentile |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coldest month, mean daily low | 0.9 °C | 6.8 °C | 12.6 °C |
| Warmest month, mean daily high | 20.4 °C | 25.6 °C | 30.4 °C |
| Annual rainfall | 456 mm | 737 mm | 1,241 mm |
| Rainfall in the driest quarter | 11 mm | 52 mm | 141 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 2,006 research-grade observations of Commelina africana 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 40 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.
- Commelina acuminata R.Br.
- Commelina africana var. africana
- Commelina africana var. barberae (C.B.Clarke) C.B.Clarke
- Commelina africana var. boehmiana (K.Schum.) Brenan
- Commelina africana var. brevipila Brenan
- Commelina africana var. diffusa Brenan
- Commelina africana var. polyclada Welw. ex C.B.Clarke
- Commelina angolensis C.B.Clarke
- Commelina bakueana A.Chev.
- Commelina barbata var. villosior C.B.Clarke
- Commelina benghalensis Forssk.
- Commelina boehmiana K.Schum.
- Commelina buchananii C.B.Clarke
- Commelina cordifolia A.Rich.
- Commelina dinteri Mildbr. & Mildbr.
- Commelina divaricata Vahl
- Commelina edulis A.Rich.
- Commelina elliotii C.B.Clarke & Rendle ex Scott Elliot
- Commelina flava Salisb.
- Commelina hirsuta R.Br.
- Commelina involucrosa A.Rich.
- Commelina karooica C.B.Clarke
- Commelina karooica var. barberae C.B.Clarke
- Commelina kirkii C.B.Clarke
and 16 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.
- 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.