Eulophia cucullata

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Eulophia cucullata, photographed by Suvarna Parbhoo Mohan — fig. b Suvarna Parbhoo Mohan, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 109380256

Eulophia cucullata, photographed by i_c_riddell — fig. c i_c_riddell, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 1283919

Eulophia cucullata, photographed by hugorainey — fig. d hugorainey, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 118583429

Eulophia cucullata, photographed by desertnaturalist — fig. g desertnaturalist, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 52419719

Eulophia cucullata, photographed by Aaliyah Motala — fig. h Aaliyah Motala, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 109835417

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 36 botanical countries

Native distribution of Eulophia cucullata, 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
Angola	ANG	AFRICA
Benin	BEN
Burkina	BKN
Burundi	BUR
Cameroon	CMN
Central African Republic	CAF
Chad	CHA
Comoros	COM
Congo	CON
Djibouti	DJI
DR Congo	ZAI
Ethiopia	ETH
Gabon	GAB
Gambia	GAM
Ghana	GHA
Guinea	GUI
Guinea-Bissau	GNB
Ivory Coast	IVO
Kenya	KEN
KwaZulu-Natal	NAT
Madagascar	MDG
Malawi	MLW
Mali	MLI
Mozambique	MOZ
Niger	NGR
Nigeria	NGA
Northern Provinces	TVL
Rwanda	RWA
Senegal	SEN
Sierra Leone	SIE
Sudan-South Sudan	SUD
Tanzania	TAN
Togo	TOG
Uganda	UGA
Zambia	ZAM
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 61 in flower of 61 examined

100%

Proportion of examined Eulophia cucullata in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	2	2	too few examined
Feb	0	0	too few examined
Mar	1	1	too few examined
Apr	2	2	too few examined
May	3	3	too few examined
Jun	0	0	too few examined
Jul	0	0	too few examined
Aug	0	0	too few examined
Sep	3	3	too few examined
Oct	16	16	100%	81% to 100%
Nov	30	30	100%	89% to 100%
Dec	4	4	too few examined

Peak flowering in Oct. Each bar is the share of Eulophia cucullata 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. 61 of 61 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 10 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. 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 369 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	8.2 °C	12.5 °C	20.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	26.6 °C	29.5 °C	32.9 °C
Annual rainfall	842 mm	1,173 mm	2,050 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	1 mm	8 mm	175 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 369 research-grade observations of Eulophia cucullata 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 17 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.

Eulophia arenaria (Lindl.) Bolus
Eulophia cucullata var. dilecta (Rchb.f.) Pérez-Vera
Eulophia dilecta (Rchb.f.) Schltr.
Eulophia kondensis Butzin
Eulophia monteiroi (Rolfe) Butzin
Eulophia stylites (Rchb.f.) A.D.Hawkes
Limodorum cucullatum Afzel. ex Sw.
Lissochilus amabilis Schltr.
Lissochilus arenarius Lindl.
Lissochilus cucullatus (Afzel. ex Sw.) Szlach.
Lissochilus dilectus Rchb.f.
Lissochilus dilectus f. minor Rchb.f.
Lissochilus euanthus Schltr.
Lissochilus kaessnerianus Kraenzl.
Lissochilus monteiroi Rolfe
Lissochilus roscheri Rchb.f.
Lissochilus stylites Rchb.f.

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.