Eulophia speciosa

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Eulophia speciosa, photographed by Matthew Fainman — fig. b Matthew Fainman, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 173216545

Eulophia speciosa, photographed by Rosemary Harrison — fig. c Rosemary Harrison, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 168509600

Eulophia speciosa, photographed by Shaun Swanepoel — fig. f Shaun Swanepoel, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 105912171

Eulophia speciosa, photographed by Mahomed Desai — fig. g Mahomed Desai, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 105109246

Eulophia speciosa, photographed by Nicola van Berkel — fig. h Nicola van Berkel, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 59510178

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 20 botanical countries

Native distribution of Eulophia speciosa, 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
Botswana	BOT
Burundi	BUR
Cape Provinces	CPP
DR Congo	ZAI
Eswatini	SWZ
Ethiopia	ETH
Kenya	KEN
KwaZulu-Natal	NAT
Malawi	MLW
Mozambique	MOZ
Namibia	NAM
Northern Provinces	TVL
Sudan-South Sudan	SUD
Tanzania	TAN
Uganda	UGA
Zambia	ZAM
Zimbabwe	ZIM
Saudi Arabia	SAU	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Yemen	YEM

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 95 in flower of 110 examined

88%

83%

20%

100%

92%

Proportion of examined Eulophia speciosa in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	14	16	88%	64% to 97%
Feb	5	6	83%	44% to 97%
Mar	3	4	too few examined
Apr	0	3	too few examined
May	1	5	20%	4% to 62%
Jun	0	1	too few examined
Jul	2	3	too few examined
Aug	0	0	too few examined
Sep	4	4	too few examined
Oct	10	10	100%	72% to 100%
Nov	34	34	100%	90% to 100%
Dec	22	24	92%	74% to 98%

Peak flowering in Oct. Each bar is the share of Eulophia speciosa 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. 95 of 110 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 6 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 669 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	9.4 °C	13.2 °C	18.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	22.6 °C	25.2 °C	30.5 °C
Annual rainfall	576 mm	877 mm	1,171 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	3 mm	120 mm	181 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 669 research-grade observations of Eulophia speciosa 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 28 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.

Cymbidium giganteum (L.f.) Sw.
Cyrtopera gigantea (L.f.) Lindl.
Epidendrum giganteum (L.f.) Poir.
Eulophia austrooccidentalis Sölch
Eulophia brevisepala (Rendle) Summerh.
Eulophia caloptera (Rchb.f.) Summerh.
Eulophia dispersa N.E.Br.
Eulophia granitica (Rchb.f.) Butzin
Eulophia homblei (De Wild.) Butzin
Eulophia leucantha (Kraenzl.) Sölch
Eulophia sapinii De Wild.
Eulophia speciosa var. culveri Schltr.
Eulophia volkensii (Rolfe) Butzin
Eulophia wakefieldii (Rchb.f. & S.Moore) Summerh.
Limodorum giganteum (L.f.) Thunb.
Lissochilus brevisepalus Rendle
Lissochilus calopterus Rchb.f.
Lissochilus dispersus (N.E.Br.) Rolfe
Lissochilus hereroensis Kraenzl.
Lissochilus homblei De Wild.
Lissochilus leucanthus Kraenzl.
Lissochilus rendlei Rolfe
Lissochilus sapinii De Wild.
Lissochilus speciosus R.Br.

and 4 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.