Diospyros ferrea (black ebony)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 5 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 5 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Diospyros ferrea, photographed by 葉子 — fig. a 葉子, CC0 1.0 / 2021-03-11 / obs. 117351815

Diospyros ferrea, photographed by Cheng-Tao Lin — fig. d Cheng-Tao Lin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 60435768

Diospyros ferrea, photographed by 呂一起(Lyu yi-chi) — fig. e 呂一起(Lyu yi-chi), CC BY 4.0 / obs. 165624949

Diospyros ferrea, photographed by Nandini Rajamani — fig. h Nandini Rajamani, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 88801209

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: 04711334
Filed as: Diospyros ferrea (Willd.) Bakh.
Det. by: C. Sam; G. M. Plunkett 2021-04-14
Collected: G. M. Plunkett 2016-12-02
Origin: VU
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 22 botanical countries

Native distribution of Diospyros ferrea, 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
Bangladesh	BAN	ASIA-TROPICAL
Borneo	BOR
Cambodia	CBD
India	IND
Jawa	JAW
Laos	LAO
Lesser Sunda Is.	LSI
Malaya	MLY
Maluku	MOL
Myanmar	MYA
New Guinea	NWG
Philippines	PHI
Solomon Is.	SOL
Sri Lanka	SRL
Sulawesi	SUL
Sumatera	SUM
Thailand	THA
Vietnam	VIE
Nansei-shoto	NNS	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Taiwan	TAI
Santa Cruz Is.	SCZ	PACIFIC
Vanuatu	VAN

Not drawn on the map: Santa Cruz Is.. We hold no public-domain boundary for this region, so it is listed rather than guessed at.

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 109 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	15.2 °C	19.5 °C	21.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	28.0 °C	28.8 °C	37.8 °C
Annual rainfall	1,015 mm	2,442 mm	3,484 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	41 mm	274 mm	550 mm

It is not found anywhere that gets close to freezing. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 109 research-grade observations of Diospyros ferrea 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 44 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.

Diospyros angustifolia (Miq.) Kosterm.
Diospyros egbert-walkeri Kosterm.
Diospyros ferrea f. angustata Bakh.
Diospyros ferrea f. globosa Bakh.
Diospyros ferrea f. lamponga (Miq.) Bakh.
Diospyros ferrea f. oblanceolata Bakh.
Diospyros ferrea f. oblonga Bakh.
Diospyros ferrea f. oblongata Bakh.
Diospyros ferrea f. obovata Bakh.
Diospyros ferrea f. subelliptica Bakh.
Diospyros ferrea var. angustifolia (Miq.) Bakh.
Diospyros ferrea var. angustifolia (Miq.) M.Mohanan
Diospyros ferrea var. aroeensis Bakh.
Diospyros ferrea var. buxifolia (Rottb.) Bakh.
Diospyros ferrea var. buxoides Bakh.
Diospyros ferrea var. ellipsoidea Bakh.
Diospyros ferrea var. indonesica Bakh.
Diospyros ferrea var. lamponga (Miq.) Bakh.
Diospyros ferrea var. salomonensis Bakh.
Diospyros nigrescens (Dalzell) C.J.Saldanha
Diospyros salomonensis (Bakh.) Kosterm.
Diospyros vera (Lour.) A.Chev.
Ebenoxylum verum Lour.
Ebenus lamponga (Miq.) Kuntze

and 20 more.

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.
USDA PLANTS Database. common name, checklist symbol DIFE6. public domain. 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.