Ehretia rigida | BotanAI

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Ehretia rigida, photographed by Matthew Fainman — fig. a Matthew Fainman, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-04-18 / obs. 189090192

Ehretia rigida, photographed by Manuel R Popp — fig. b Manuel R Popp, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 167391473

Ehretia rigida, photographed by Tony Rebelo — fig. c Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 137028652

Ehretia rigida, photographed by Hildegard Klein — fig. e Hildegard Klein, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 124560736

Ehretia rigida, photographed by James Deacon — fig. f James Deacon, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 116376620

Ehretia rigida, photographed by Shaun Swanepoel — fig. g Shaun Swanepoel, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 106014977

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: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Accession: K000489235
Filed as: Ehretia rigida (Thunb.) Druce
Det. by: Flemming
Collected: Yalala, A.M. 1960-11-18
Origin: BW
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 9 botanical countries

Native distribution of Ehretia rigida, 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
Botswana	BOT	AFRICA
Cape Provinces	CPP
Eswatini	SWZ
Free State	OFS
KwaZulu-Natal	NAT
Lesotho	LES
Mozambique	MOZ
Northern Provinces	TVL
Zimbabwe	ZIM

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 120 in flower of 174 examined

37%

50%

75%

71%

73%

17%

100%

82%

93%

65%

72%

Proportion of examined Ehretia rigida in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	7	19	37%	19% to 59%
Feb	5	10	50%	24% to 76%
Mar	6	8	75%	41% to 93%
Apr	10	14	71%	45% to 88%
May	8	11	73%	43% to 90%
Jun	2	12	17%	5% to 45%
Jul	2	3	too few examined
Aug	5	5	100%	57% to 100%
Sep	14	17	82%	59% to 94%
Oct	37	40	93%	80% to 97%
Nov	11	17	65%	41% to 83%
Dec	13	18	72%	49% to 88%

Peak flowering in Aug. Each bar is the share of Ehretia rigida 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. 120 of 174 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. One month has fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for it. 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 1,011 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	2.5 °C	6.1 °C	12.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	25.1 °C	27.3 °C	30.4 °C
Annual rainfall	434 mm	631 mm	795 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	13 mm	31 mm	104 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 1,011 research-grade observations of Ehretia rigida 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 6 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.

Capraria rigida Thunb.
Ehretia eckloniana H.Buek ex Harv.
Ehretia hottentotica Burch.
Ehretia violacea Kunth
Ehretia zeyheriana H.Buek ex Drege
Freylinia rigida (Thunb.) G.Don

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.