Erythrostemon gilliesii(Hook.) Klotzsch

bird-of-paradise shrub

WFO wfo-0001056564 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Erythrostemon gilliesii, photographed by Andrew Tree
fig. a Andrew Tree, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-25 / obs. 200580511

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 3607837
Filed as
Erythrostemon gilliesii (Hook.) Klotzsch
Det. by
Strong, Mark T., (BOT), Smithsonian Institution - National Museum of Natural History (UNITED STATES)
Collected
A. Halloran 1940
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 6 botanical countries

Regions where Erythrostemon gilliesii is native: Argentina Northeast, Argentina Northwest, Argentina South, Chile Central, Chile North, Uruguay Argentina NortheastArgentina NorthwestArgentina SouthChile CentralChile NorthUruguay
Native distribution of Erythrostemon gilliesii, 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
Argentina Northeast AGE SOUTHERN AMERICA
Argentina Northwest AGW
Argentina South AGS
Chile Central CLC
Chile North CLN
Uruguay URU

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 334 in flower of 361 examined

Proportion of examined Erythrostemon gilliesii in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 23 25 92% 75% to 98%
Feb 16 19 84% 62% to 94%
Mar 9 11 82% 52% to 95%
Apr 33 39 85% 70% to 93%
May 55 61 90% 80% to 95%
Jun 30 30 100% 89% to 100%
Jul 18 19 95% 75% to 99%
Aug 18 18 100% 82% to 100%
Sep 11 12 92% 65% to 99%
Oct 51 54 94% 85% to 98%
Nov 40 41 98% 87% to 100%
Dec 30 32 94% 80% to 98%

Peak flowering in Jun. Each bar is the share of Erythrostemon gilliesii 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. 334 of 361 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 1,978 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -1.4 °C 3.6 °C 9.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 25.5 °C 32.4 °C 36.8 °C
Annual rainfall 202 mm 430 mm 1,164 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 5 mm 33 mm 173 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 1,978 research-grade observations of Erythrostemon gilliesii 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 4 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.

  • Caesalpinia gilliesii (Hook.) D.Dietr.
  • Caesalpinia macrantha Delile
  • Poinciana gilliesii Hook.
  • Prosopis gillesii (Hook.) Macloskie

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