Eugenia punicifolia

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 5 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 5 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.

Eugenia punicifolia, photographed by Márcia Martins — fig. a Márcia Martins, CC BY 4.0 / 2020-10-13 / obs. 100239327

Eugenia punicifolia, photographed by Tsssss — fig. b Tsssss, CC0 1.0 / obs. 95653243

Eugenia punicifolia, photographed by Kristof Zyskowski — fig. e Kristof Zyskowski, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 5725261

Eugenia punicifolia, photographed by Mario Barroso — fig. f Mario Barroso, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 160138930

Eugenia punicifolia, photographed by Reinaldo de Oliveira Elias — fig. g Reinaldo de Oliveira Elias, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 147928282

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: 545514
Filed as: Eugenia punicifolia (Kunth) DC.
Det. by: M. Sobral 2013-01-01
Collected: M. Alves 2000-06-17
Origin: BR
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 15 botanical countries

Native distribution of Eugenia punicifolia, 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
Argentina Northeast	AGE	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Bolivia	BOL
Brazil North	BZN
Brazil Northeast	BZE
Brazil South	BZS
Brazil Southeast	BZL
Brazil West-Central	BZC
Colombia	CLM
Cuba	CUB
French Guiana	FRG
Guyana	GUY
Paraguay	PAR
Peru	PER
Suriname	SUR
Venezuela	VEN

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 149 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	10.9 °C	20.0 °C	24.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	25.4 °C	29.3 °C	31.0 °C
Annual rainfall	1,173 mm	1,515 mm	3,191 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	18 mm	85 mm	245 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 149 research-grade observations of Eugenia punicifolia 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 102 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.

Emurtia punicifolia (Kunth) Raf.
Eugenia ambigua O.Berg
Eugenia arbutifolia O.Berg
Eugenia arbutifolia var. obscura O.Berg
Eugenia arbutifolia var. pallida O.Berg
Eugenia arctostaphyloides O.Berg
Eugenia arctostaphyloides var. ovalis O.Berg
Eugenia benthamii O.Berg
Eugenia boliviensis O.Berg
Eugenia calycolpoides Griseb.
Eugenia chlorophyta Barb.Rodr.
Eugenia ciarensis O.Berg
Eugenia clinocarpa DC.
Eugenia coarensis DC.
Eugenia dasyantha O.Berg
Eugenia decorticans O.Berg
Eugenia diantha O.Berg
Eugenia diantha var. ciliata O.Berg
Eugenia diantha var. glabra O.Berg
Eugenia dipoda DC.
Eugenia dipoda f. grandifolia Miq.
Eugenia dipoda var. brachypoda DC.
Eugenia discolor Barb.Rodr. ex Chodat & Hassl.
Eugenia diversiflora O.Berg

and 78 more.

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.