Cucumis hirsutus

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Cucumis hirsutus, photographed by Mahomed Desai — fig. b Mahomed Desai, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 110509270

Cucumis hirsutus, photographed by Aaliyah Motala — fig. c Aaliyah Motala, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 110506632

Cucumis hirsutus, photographed by Tam — fig. d Tam, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 66932176

Cucumis hirsutus, photographed by Peter Warren — fig. e Peter Warren, CC0 1.0 / obs. 28617566

Cucumis hirsutus, photographed by Suvarna Parbhoo Mohan — fig. f Suvarna Parbhoo Mohan, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 75006686

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 17 botanical countries

Native distribution of Cucumis hirsutus, 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
Angola	ANG	AFRICA
Botswana	BOT
Burundi	BUR
Cameroon	CMN
Cape Provinces	CPP
Congo	CON
DR Congo	ZAI
Eswatini	SWZ
Kenya	KEN
KwaZulu-Natal	NAT
Malawi	MLW
Mozambique	MOZ
Northern Provinces	TVL
Sudan-South Sudan	SUD
Tanzania	TAN
Zambia	ZAM
Zimbabwe	ZIM

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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 188 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	0.3 °C	5.3 °C	14.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	22.2 °C	25.6 °C	31.9 °C
Annual rainfall	464 mm	819 mm	1,260 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	7 mm	38 mm	136 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 188 research-grade observations of Cucumis hirsutus 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.

Also published as 11 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.

Cucumis gossweileri C.Norman
Cucumis hirsutus var. dissectus Cogn.
Cucumis hirsutus var. major Cogn.
Cucumis hirsutus var. ovatus Cogn.
Cucumis hirsutus var. welwitschii (Cogn.) R.Fern. & A.Fern.
Cucumis homblei De Wild.
Cucumis seretii De Wild.
Cucumis seretioides Suess.
Cucumis sonderi Cogn.
Cucumis welwitschii Cogn.
Cucumis wildemanianus Cogn.

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.