Cordia sebestenaL.

BroadleafGeiger Treelargeleaf geigertree

WFO wfo-0000620951 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Cordia sebestena, photographed by Juan Cruzado Cortés
fig. a Juan Cruzado Cortés, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-06-04 / obs. 203342405
Cordia sebestena, photographed by Josiah Londerée
fig. b Josiah Londerée, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 198449524
Cordia sebestena, photographed by Jay Pruett
fig. c Jay Pruett, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 186969613
Cordia sebestena, photographed by Jay Pruett
fig. d Jay Pruett, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 186982450
Cordia sebestena, photographed by Jay Pruett
fig. e Jay Pruett, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 186983323
Cordia sebestena, photographed by Haydeé Salmones
fig. f Haydeé Salmones, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 187137825
Cordia sebestena, photographed by LBuffum
fig. g LBuffum, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 181606863
Cordia sebestena, photographed by Jean-Paul Boerekamps
fig. h Jean-Paul Boerekamps, CC0 1.0 / obs. 181935710

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

Regions where Cordia sebestena is native: Mexico Gulf, Mexico Southeast, Mexico Southwest, Bahamas, Belize, Cayman Is., Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Panamá, Southwest Caribbean, Turks-Caicos Is., Venezuela, Venezuelan Antilles Mexico GulfMexico SoutheastMexico SouthwestBelizeColombiaCubaDominican RepublicEl SalvadorGuatemalaHaitiHondurasJamaicaNicaraguaPanamáSouthwest CaribbeanVenezuela BahamasCayman Is.Turks-Caicos Is.Venezuelan Antilles
Native distribution of Cordia sebestena, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Bahamas BAH SOUTHERN AMERICA
Belize BLZ
Cayman Is. CAY
Colombia CLM
Cuba CUB
Dominican Republic DOM
El Salvador ELS
Guatemala GUA
Haiti HAI
Honduras HON
Jamaica JAM
Nicaragua NIC
Panamá PAN
Southwest Caribbean SWC
Turks-Caicos Is. TCI
Venezuela VEN
Venezuelan Antilles VNA
Mexico Gulf MXG NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Southeast MXT
Mexico Southwest MXS

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 245 in flower of 259 examined

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Cordia sebestena 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. 245 of 259 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 2,003 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 15.8 °C 22.4 °C 25.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 27.9 °C 29.2 °C 34.7 °C
Annual rainfall 543 mm 1,337 mm 2,147 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 14 mm 149 mm 285 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 2,003 research-grade observations of Cordia sebestena 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 7 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.

  • Cordia caymanensis Urb.
  • Cordia juglandifolia Jacq.
  • Cordia laevis Jacq.
  • Cordia sebestena var. rubra Eggers
  • Lithocardium laeve (Jacq.) Kuntze
  • Sebesten sebestena (L.) Britton
  • Sebestena repanda Raf.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. 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.