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
- The New York Botanical Garden
- Accession
- 01174581
- Filed as
- Cyperus giganteus Vahl
- Det. by
- W. A. Rodrigues 1963-04-01
- Collected
- W. A. Rodrigues
- Origin
- BR
- The sheet
- View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)
A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. We link to the digitised sheet rather than rehosting it, because the holding institutions do not serve their images to third parties reliably and we are not going to show you a picture we cannot actually deliver. 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 sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.
Native range 31 botanical countries
| Region | TDWG code | Continent |
|---|---|---|
| Argentina Northeast | AGE | SOUTHERN AMERICA |
| Argentina Northwest | AGW | |
| Belize | BLZ | |
| Bolivia | BOL | |
| Brazil North | BZN | |
| Brazil Northeast | BZE | |
| Brazil Southeast | BZL | |
| Brazil West-Central | BZC | |
| Colombia | CLM | |
| Costa Rica | COS | |
| Cuba | CUB | |
| Dominican Republic | DOM | |
| Ecuador | ECU | |
| El Salvador | ELS | |
| French Guiana | FRG | |
| Guyana | GUY | |
| Haiti | HAI | |
| Honduras | HON | |
| Jamaica | JAM | |
| Nicaragua | NIC | |
| Panamá | PAN | |
| Paraguay | PAR | |
| Peru | PER | |
| Puerto Rico | PUE | |
| Suriname | SUR | |
| Trinidad-Tobago | TRT | |
| Uruguay | URU | |
| Venezuela | VEN | |
| 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.
Where it actually grows measured, from 76 observations
| Condition | 5th percentile | Median | 95th percentile |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coldest month, mean daily low | 7.3 °C | 12.7 °C | 23.7 °C |
| Warmest month, mean daily high | 28.8 °C | 31.0 °C | 33.1 °C |
| Annual rainfall | 1,068 mm | 1,486 mm | 2,778 mm |
| Rainfall in the driest quarter | 78 mm | 156 mm | 256 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 76 research-grade observations of Cyperus giganteus 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.
- Chlorocyperus giganteus (Vahl) Palla
- Cyperus berteroi Kunth
- Cyperus conspicuus Steud.
- Cyperus densiflorus Rchb. ex Kunth
- Cyperus elatus Griseb.
- Cyperus princeps Kunth
- Papyrus comosa Willd.
- Papyrus elegans Schrad. ex Nees
- Papyrus giganteus (Vahl) Schrad. ex Nees
- Papyrus odoratus Willd. ex Nees
- Papyrus spectabilis Schrad. ex Nees
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.