Croton ciliatoglanduliferOrtega

Mexican croton

WFO wfo-0000927659 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Croton ciliatoglandulifer, photographed by Center for Urban Ecology
fig. a Center for Urban Ecology, CC0 1.0 / 2022-02-17 / obs. 179850232

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 3687495
Filed as
Croton ciliatoglandulifer Ortega
Det. by
Berry, P. E.; Van Ee, B. W.
Collected
F. Sánchez L. & G. Morales C. 2014-02-05
Origin
MX
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 13 botanical countries

Regions where Croton ciliatoglandulifer is native: Arizona, Mexico Central, Mexico Gulf, Mexico Northeast, Mexico Northwest, Mexico Southeast, Mexico Southwest, Texas, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua ArizonaMexico CentralMexico GulfMexico NortheastMexico NorthwestMexico SoutheastMexico SouthwestTexasCubaDominican RepublicHaitiHondurasNicaragua
Native distribution of Croton ciliatoglandulifer, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Arizona ARI NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Central MXC
Mexico Gulf MXG
Mexico Northeast MXE
Mexico Northwest MXN
Mexico Southeast MXT
Mexico Southwest MXS
Texas TEX
Cuba CUB SOUTHERN AMERICA
Dominican Republic DOM
Haiti HAI
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.

Flowering 106 in flower of 115 examined

Proportion of examined Croton ciliatoglandulifer in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 8 11 73% 43% to 90%
Feb 6 6 100% 61% to 100%
Mar 8 8 100% 68% to 100%
Apr 14 15 93% 70% to 99%
May 12 12 100% 76% to 100%
Jun 9 10 90% 60% to 98%
Jul 10 11 91% 62% to 98%
Aug 8 9 89% 56% to 98%
Sep 13 14 93% 69% to 99%
Oct 10 11 91% 62% to 98%
Nov 5 5 100% 57% to 100%
Dec 3 3 too few examined

Peak flowering in Feb. Each bar is the share of Croton ciliatoglandulifer 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. 106 of 115 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.

When it blooms, where you are 1 state

StatePeaksObservations in flower
Texas Feb 57

Where it actually grows measured, from 845 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 5.8 °C 10.2 °C 17.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 26.4 °C 31.6 °C 36.3 °C
Annual rainfall 423 mm 689 mm 1,288 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 9 mm 33 mm 100 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 845 research-grade observations of Croton ciliatoglandulifer 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 8 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.

  • Croton chaetodus Urb.
  • Croton chaetodus var. gonavensis Urb.
  • Croton ciliatoglandulosus Ortega ex Steud.
  • Croton ciliatoglandulosus Ortega ex Steud.
  • Croton fuertesii Urb.
  • Croton penicillatus Vent.
  • Croton pulcherrimus Willd. ex Schltdl.
  • Oxydectes ciliatoglandulosa (Ortega) Kuntze

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.