Dichondra repens

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Dichondra repens, photographed by Andrew Allen — fig. b Andrew Allen, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205372018

Dichondra repens, photographed by Joe Dillon — fig. c Joe Dillon, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203786536

Dichondra repens, photographed by Dylan Wishart — fig. g Dylan Wishart, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 197722208

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: 484525
Filed as: Dichondra repens J.R.Forst. & G.Forst.
Det. by: C. A. O'Donell 1940-10-01
Collected: L. Riedel 1833-12-01
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. 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

Native distribution of Dichondra repens, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Chatham Is.	CTM	AUSTRALASIA
New South Wales	NSW
New Zealand North	NZN
New Zealand South	NZS
Norfolk Is.	NFK
Queensland	QLD
South Australia	SOA
Tasmania	TAS
Victoria	VIC
Western Australia	WAU
Mauritius	MAU	AFRICA
Réunion	REU
Rodrigues	ROD

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 150 in flower of 383 examined

15%

58%

77%

70%

37%

Proportion of examined Dichondra repens in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	2	13	15%	4% to 42%
Feb	0	29	0%	0% to 12%
Mar	1	13	8%	1% to 33%
Apr	1	32	3%	1% to 16%
May	1	26	4%	1% to 19%
Jun	1	22	5%	1% to 22%
Jul	1	12	8%	1% to 35%
Aug	2	13	15%	4% to 42%
Sep	38	65	58%	46% to 70%
Oct	56	73	77%	66% to 85%
Nov	33	47	70%	56% to 81%
Dec	14	38	37%	23% to 53%

Peak flowering in Oct. Each bar is the share of Dichondra repens 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. 150 of 383 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 2,026 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	2.1 °C	6.3 °C	10.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	18.8 °C	25.0 °C	28.6 °C
Annual rainfall	561 mm	826 mm	1,438 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	73 mm	150 mm	248 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 2,026 research-grade observations of Dichondra repens 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 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.

Dichondra repens var. repens
Steripha reniformis Sol. ex Gaertn.

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.