Eulophia petersii

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Eulophia petersii, photographed by Peter Warren — fig. b Peter Warren, CC0 1.0 / obs. 28686231

Eulophia petersii, photographed by Antoinette Eyssell Knox — fig. c Antoinette Eyssell Knox, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 15320101

Eulophia petersii, photographed by Wynand Uys — fig. d Wynand Uys, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 153104499

Eulophia petersii, photographed by Sunčana Bradley — fig. e Sunčana Bradley, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 181099414

Eulophia petersii, photographed by Ronald Olivier — fig. f Ronald Olivier, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 112594780

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 21 botanical countries

Native distribution of Eulophia petersii, 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
Angola	ANG	AFRICA
Burundi	BUR
DR Congo	ZAI
Eritrea	ERI
Eswatini	SWZ
Ethiopia	ETH
Kenya	KEN
KwaZulu-Natal	NAT
Malawi	MLW
Mozambique	MOZ
Northern Provinces	TVL
Socotra	SOC
Somalia	SOM
Sudan-South Sudan	SUD
Tanzania	TAN
Uganda	UGA
Zambia	ZAM
Zimbabwe	ZIM
Oman	OMA	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Saudi Arabia	SAU
Yemen	YEM

Not drawn on the map: Socotra. We hold no public-domain boundary for this region, so it is listed rather than guessed at.

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 54 in flower of 68 examined

78%

40%

80%

100%

Proportion of examined Eulophia petersii in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	7	9	78%	45% to 94%
Feb	4	4	too few examined
Mar	2	2	too few examined
Apr	0	0	too few examined
May	2	3	too few examined
Jun	2	3	too few examined
Jul	2	2	too few examined
Aug	0	3	too few examined
Sep	0	0	too few examined
Oct	2	5	40%	12% to 77%
Nov	16	20	80%	58% to 92%
Dec	17	17	100%	82% to 100%

Peak flowering in Dec. Each bar is the share of Eulophia petersii 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. 54 of 68 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 8 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 166 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	5.8 °C	8.7 °C	18.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	26.4 °C	28.4 °C	32.0 °C
Annual rainfall	330 mm	758 mm	1,145 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	7 mm	36 mm	112 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 166 research-grade observations of Eulophia petersii 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 21 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.

Cyrtopera petersii (Rchb.f.) Szlach.
Epidendrum schimperi Hochst. ex A.Rich.
Eulophia afra Rchb.f.
Eulophia baginsensis Rchb.f.
Eulophia caffra Rchb.f.
Eulophia circinata Rolfe
Eulophia coleae Rolfe
Eulophia gumbariensis De Wild.
Eulophia longepedunculata Rendle
Eulophia phillipseae Rolfe
Eulophia schimperiana A.Rich.
Eulophia smithii Rolfe
Galeandra petersii Rchb.f.
Graphorchis afra (Rchb.f.) Kuntze
Graphorchis baginsensis (Rchb.f.) Kuntze
Graphorchis caffra (Rchb.f.) Kuntze
Graphorchis petersii (Rchb.f.) Kuntze
Graphorkis afra (Rchb.f.) Kuntze
Graphorkis baginsensis (Rchb.f.) Kuntze
Graphorkis caffra (Rchb.f.) Kuntze
Graphorkis petersii (Rchb.f.) Kuntze

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.