Cryptostegia grandiflora (Palay rubbervine)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Cryptostegia grandiflora, photographed by Ben Costamagna — fig. a Ben Costamagna, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-11-13 / obs. 168681663

Cryptostegia grandiflora, photographed by Jim Riley — fig. b Jim Riley, CC0 1.0 / obs. 168401957

Cryptostegia grandiflora, photographed by Bill Levine — fig. c Bill Levine, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 168501196

Cryptostegia grandiflora, photographed by Alexis López Hernández — fig. d Alexis López Hernández, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 130211944

Cryptostegia grandiflora, photographed by Eric Knight — fig. e Eric Knight, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 63171503

Cryptostegia grandiflora, photographed by S.MORE — fig. f S.MORE, CC0 1.0 / obs. 57354458

Cryptostegia grandiflora, photographed by Sula Vanderplank — fig. g Sula Vanderplank, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 54128986

Cryptostegia grandiflora, photographed by P Jeganathan — fig. h P Jeganathan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 48792430

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 1 botanical country

Native distribution of Cryptostegia grandiflora, 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
Madagascar	MDG	AFRICA

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 138 in flower of 220 examined

80%

90%

56%

63%

33%

40%

60%

56%

53%

100%

Proportion of examined Cryptostegia grandiflora in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	8	10	80%	49% to 94%
Feb	12	15	80%	55% to 93%
Mar	19	21	90%	71% to 97%
Apr	44	79	56%	45% to 66%
May	17	27	63%	44% to 78%
Jun	2	6	33%	10% to 70%
Jul	4	10	40%	17% to 69%
Aug	2	4	too few examined
Sep	6	10	60%	31% to 83%
Oct	9	16	56%	33% to 77%
Nov	8	15	53%	30% to 75%
Dec	7	7	100%	65% to 100%

Peak flowering in Dec. Each bar is the share of Cryptostegia grandiflora 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. 138 of 220 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.

Also published as 2 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.

Cryptostegia grandiflora var. tulearensis Costantin & Gallaud
Nerium grandiflorum (Roxb. ex R.Br.) Roxb.

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.