Euphorbia pubentissimaMichx.

false flowering spurge

WFO wfo-0000964251 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Euphorbia pubentissima, photographed by Lauren McLaurin
fig. a Lauren McLaurin, CC BY 4.0 / 2020-09-11 / obs. 94775535

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
Smithsonian, US National Herbarium
Accession
US 1810532
Filed as
Euphorbia pubentissima Michx.
Det. by
Huft, M. J.
Collected
M. L. Fernald & B. H. Long 1938-06-17
Origin
US
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC0 1.0)

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 11 botanical countries

Regions where Euphorbia pubentissima is native: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia AlabamaFloridaGeorgiaLouisianaMarylandMississippiNorth CarolinaSouth CarolinaTennesseeVirginiaWest Virginia
Native distribution of Euphorbia pubentissima, 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
Alabama ALA NORTHERN AMERICA
Florida FLA
Georgia GEO
Louisiana LOU
Maryland MRY
Mississippi MSI
North Carolina NCA
South Carolina SCA
Tennessee TEN
Virginia VRG
West Virginia WVA

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 96 in flower of 112 examined

Proportion of examined Euphorbia pubentissima in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 0 too few examined
Feb 0 0 too few examined
Mar 0 0 too few examined
Apr 22 26 85% 66% to 94%
May 24 26 92% 76% to 98%
Jun 9 12 75% 47% to 91%
Jul 13 14 93% 69% to 99%
Aug 8 8 100% 68% to 100%
Sep 15 17 88% 66% to 97%
Oct 5 8 63% 31% to 86%
Nov 0 1 too few examined
Dec 0 0 too few examined

Peak flowering in Aug. Each bar is the share of Euphorbia pubentissima 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. 96 of 112 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 5 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 467 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -1.8 °C 1.6 °C 5.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 26.7 °C 31.2 °C 32.7 °C
Annual rainfall 1,156 mm 1,391 mm 1,834 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 243 mm 290 mm 407 mm

It is found where winters bring light frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 467 research-grade observations of Euphorbia pubentissima 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.

  • Agaloma apocynifolia (Small) Nieuwl.
  • Agaloma paniculata (Boiss.) Nieuwl.
  • Agaloma pubentissima (Michx.) D.B.Ward
  • Agaloma zinniflora (Small) Nieuwl.
  • Agaloma zinniiflora (Small) Nieuwl.
  • Euphorbia apocynifolia Small
  • Euphorbia corollata var. apocynifolia (Small) Millsp.
  • Euphorbia corollata var. mollis Millsp.
  • Euphorbia corollata var. paniculata (Elliott) Boiss.
  • Euphorbia corollata var. zinniiflora (Small) H.E.Ahles
  • Euphorbia paniculata Elliott
  • Euphorbia pubentissima var. glabrata Boiss.
  • Euphorbia zinniiflora Small
  • Tithymalopsis apocynifolia (Small) Small
  • Tithymalopsis paniculata Small
  • Tithymalopsis zinniiflora Small
  • Tithymalus paniculatus 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.