Eugenia uniflora (Surinam cherry)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Eugenia uniflora, photographed by Josiah Londerée — fig. a Josiah Londerée, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-17 / obs. 198446432

Eugenia uniflora, photographed by Florencia Grattarola — fig. b Florencia Grattarola, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 197622151

Eugenia uniflora, photographed by Center for Urban Ecology — fig. c Center for Urban Ecology, CC0 1.0 / obs. 197060573

Eugenia uniflora, photographed by Theo Summer — fig. g Theo Summer, CC0 1.0 / obs. 190413583

Eugenia uniflora, photographed by Greg Tasney — fig. h Greg Tasney, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 185183823

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.

Native range 8 botanical countries

Native distribution of Eugenia uniflora, 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
Argentina Northwest	AGW
Bolivia	BOL
Brazil Northeast	BZE
Brazil South	BZS
Brazil Southeast	BZL
Paraguay	PAR
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 125 in flower of 509 examined

17%

32%

16%

20%

10%

26%

41%

73%

42%

26%

10%

Proportion of examined Eugenia uniflora in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	5	29	17%	8% to 35%
Feb	7	22	32%	16% to 53%
Mar	6	37	16%	8% to 31%
Apr	14	70	20%	12% to 31%
May	5	48	10%	5% to 22%
Jun	8	31	26%	14% to 43%
Jul	9	22	41%	23% to 61%
Aug	22	30	73%	56% to 86%
Sep	20	48	42%	29% to 56%
Oct	23	87	26%	18% to 37%
Nov	3	56	5%	2% to 15%
Dec	3	29	10%	4% to 26%

Peak flowering in Aug. Each bar is the share of Eugenia uniflora 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. 125 of 509 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 1,985 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	7.9 °C	13.8 °C	21.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	24.8 °C	28.9 °C	31.9 °C
Annual rainfall	927 mm	1,461 mm	2,665 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	40 mm	176 mm	377 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,985 research-grade observations of Eugenia uniflora 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 49 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.

Eugenia arechavaletae Herter
Eugenia costata Brongn. & Gris
Eugenia costata Cambess.
Eugenia dasyblasta (O.Berg) Nied.
Eugenia decidua Merr.
Eugenia lacustris Barb.Rodr.
Eugenia michelii Lam.
Eugenia microphylla Barb.Rodr.
Eugenia myrtifolia Salisb.
Eugenia oblongifolia (O.Berg) Arechav.
Eugenia oblongifolia (O.Berg) Nied.
Eugenia pauper Guillaumin
Eugenia strigosa (O.Berg) Arechav.
Eugenia uniflora var. atropurpurea Mattos
Eugenia willdenowii (Spreng.) DC.
Eugenia zeylanica Willd.
Luma arechavaletae (Herter) Herter
Luma costata (Cambess.) Herter
Luma dasyblasta (O.Berg) Herter
Luma strigosa (O.Berg) Herter
Myrtus brasiliana L.
Myrtus brasiliana var. diversifolia Kuntze
Myrtus brasiliana var. lanceolata Kuntze
Myrtus brasiliana var. lucida (O.Berg) Kuntze

and 25 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.
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.