Dubautia laxaHook. & Arn.

na'ena'e pua melemele

WFO wfo-0000088971 Accepted WFO 2026-06 6 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–f · 2 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 2 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.

Dubautia laxa, photographed by Kevin Faccenda
fig. a Kevin Faccenda, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-02-21 / obs. 180751193

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
Smithsonian, US National Herbarium
Accession
US 1758133
Filed as
Dubautia laxa subsp. hirsuta (Hillebr.) G.D.Carr
Det. by
Carr, G. D.
Collected
E. Ordonez 1940-07-28
Origin
US
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC0 1.0)

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 1 botanical country

Regions where Dubautia laxa is native: Hawaii Hawaii
Native distribution of Dubautia laxa, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Hawaii HAW PACIFIC

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 58 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 14.2 °C 17.8 °C 21.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 21.5 °C 25.8 °C 29.0 °C
Annual rainfall 932 mm 1,400 mm 3,183 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 104 mm 203 mm 616 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 58 research-grade observations of Dubautia laxa 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 13 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.

  • Dubautia fauriei H.Lév.
  • Dubautia knudsenii var. degeneri Sherff
  • Dubautia laxa var. bryanii Sherff
  • Dubautia laxa var. greenwelliae O.Deg. & Sherff
  • Dubautia laxa var. hirsuta Hillebr.
  • Dubautia laxa var. hispida Sherff
  • Dubautia laxa var. laxa
  • Dubautia laxa var. obovata Sherff
  • Dubautia laxa var. pedicellata Rock
  • Dubautia laxa var. pseudoplantaginea Skottsb.
  • Dubautia laxa var. skottsbergii Sherff
  • Dubautia laxa var. waianensis O.Deg. & Sherff
  • Raillardia fauriei H.Lév.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. 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.