Ditaxis mercurialina (tall silverbush)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Ditaxis mercurialina, photographed by Annika Lindqvist — fig. a Annika Lindqvist, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-08 / obs. 198202631

Ditaxis mercurialina, photographed by Reid Hardin — fig. c Reid Hardin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 133255132

Ditaxis mercurialina, photographed by Michelle W. （鍾偉瑋） — fig. e Michelle W. （鍾偉瑋）, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 75321012

Ditaxis mercurialina, photographed by Sam Kieschnick — fig. f Sam Kieschnick, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 18787996

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 6 botanical countries

Native distribution of Ditaxis mercurialina, 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
Arkansas	ARK	NORTHERN AMERICA
Colorado	COL
Kansas	KAN
New Mexico	NWM
Oklahoma	OKL
Texas	TEX

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 251 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-1.2 °C	3.7 °C	6.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	32.5 °C	34.3 °C	34.8 °C
Annual rainfall	506 mm	933 mm	1,093 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	58 mm	170 mm	202 mm

It is found where winters bring light frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 251 research-grade observations of Ditaxis mercurialina 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 5 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.

Aphora drummondii (Benth.) Engelm. & Gray
Aphora mercurialina Nutt.
Aphora mercurialina var. pumila Torr.
Argythamnia mercurialina (Nutt.) Müll.Arg.
Serophyton drummondii Benth.

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 ARME5. 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.