Euphorbia miliiDes Moul.

Christ plantCrown of thornschristplant

WFO wfo-0000963364 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 7 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 7 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.

Euphorbia milii, photographed by Kristof Zyskowski
fig. a Kristof Zyskowski, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-04-04 / obs. 202075454

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
309415
Filed as
Euphorbia milii var. splendens (Bojer ex Hook.) Ursch & Leandri
Det. by
M. H. Nee 1999-01-01
Collected
M. H. Nee 1998-05-26
Origin
BO
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 1 botanical country

Regions where Euphorbia milii is native: Madagascar Madagascar
Native distribution of Euphorbia milii, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Madagascar MDG AFRICA

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 101 in flower of 105 examined

Proportion of examined Euphorbia milii in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 6 6 100% 61% to 100%
Feb 5 5 100% 57% to 100%
Mar 11 11 100% 74% to 100%
Apr 14 15 93% 70% to 99%
May 5 5 100% 57% to 100%
Jun 11 12 92% 65% to 99%
Jul 7 7 100% 65% to 100%
Aug 10 10 100% 72% to 100%
Sep 10 10 100% 72% to 100%
Oct 9 9 100% 70% to 100%
Nov 9 10 90% 60% to 98%
Dec 4 5 80% 38% to 96%

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Euphorbia milii 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. 101 of 105 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 863 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 5.6 °C 13.8 °C 23.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 23.8 °C 28.6 °C 38.0 °C
Annual rainfall 531 mm 1,442 mm 3,376 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 2 mm 71 mm 391 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 863 research-grade observations of Euphorbia milii 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.

Named cultivars 1 recorded

Selections of Euphorbia milii that somebody named and propagated. A cultivar is not a botanical taxon: it is governed by the cultivated-plant code rather than the botanical one, so it appears in no taxonomic backbone, and it has no native range and no wild population of its own. These get no page here, because a cultivar has no photographs, no range and no flowering data of its own, and a page with none of those is not a page.

From Wikidata (CC0), joined to this species on its World Flora Online identifier, so the link to the parent is exact rather than a name match. This list is what is recorded in an openly licensed register; it is not every cultivar that exists, and for many genera it is not close. Why, and how far short it falls.

Also published as 11 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.

  • Euphorbia bajeri var. mucronulatus Ram.Goyena
  • Euphorbia bojeri Hook.
  • Euphorbia bojeri Hook.
  • Euphorbia breonii Nois.
  • Euphorbia milii f. lutea Leandri
  • Euphorbia milii var. breonii (Nois.) Ursch & Leandri
  • Euphorbia milii var. milii
  • Euphorbia splendens subsp. bojeri (Hook.) Denis
  • Euphorbia splendens var. bojeri (Hook.) Costantin & Gallaud
  • Sterigmanthe bojeri (Hook.) Klotzsch & Garcke
  • Tumalis bojeri (Hook.) Raf.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. 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.