Erythroxylum rotundifolium (ratwood)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 4 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 4 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.

Erythroxylum rotundifolium, photographed by Alexis López Hernández — fig. a Alexis López Hernández, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-09-09 / obs. 167399341

Erythroxylum rotundifolium, photographed by Eugenio Padilla — fig. b Eugenio Padilla, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 80845545

Erythroxylum rotundifolium, photographed by Adam J. Searcy — fig. f Adam J. Searcy, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 67395089

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: 990952
Filed as: Erythroxylum rotundifolium Lunan
Det. by: T. C. Plowman 1984-01-01
Collected: J. MacFadyen
Origin: JM
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 21 botanical countries

Native distribution of Erythroxylum rotundifolium, 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
Bahamas	BAH	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Belize	BLZ
Cayman Is.	CAY
Costa Rica	COS
Cuba	CUB
Dominican Republic	DOM
El Salvador	ELS
Guatemala	GUA
Haiti	HAI
Honduras	HON
Jamaica	JAM
Leeward Is.	LEE
Nicaragua	NIC
Puerto Rico	PUE
Trinidad-Tobago	TRT
Turks-Caicos Is.	TCI
Mexico Central	MXC	NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Gulf	MXG
Mexico Northeast	MXE
Mexico Southeast	MXT
Mexico Southwest	MXS

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 33 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	10.5 °C	22.3 °C	24.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	28.3 °C	29.5 °C	34.1 °C
Annual rainfall	724 mm	1,112 mm	1,448 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	19 mm	119 mm	174 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 33 research-grade observations of Erythroxylum rotundifolium 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 14 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.

Erythroxylum brevipes var. spinescens (A.Rich.) M.Gómez
Erythroxylum brevipes var. spinescens (A.Rich.) Griseb.
Erythroxylum compactum Rose
Erythroxylum fiscalense Standl.
Erythroxylum obovatum Macfad.
Erythroxylum pallidum Rose
Erythroxylum pringlei Rose
Erythroxylum sessiliflorum O.E.Schulz
Erythroxylum spinescens A.Rich.
Erythroxylum suave O.E.Schulz
Erythroxylum suave var. aneurum O.E.Schulz
Erythroxylum suave var. compactum (Rose) O.E.Schulz
Erythroxylum suave var. jamaicense O.E.Schulz
Erythroxylum tikalense Lundell

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.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. 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.