Fatoua villosa(Thunb.) Nakai

CrabweedFoolish-weedMulberry-weedhairy crabweed

WFO wfo-0000685953 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Fatoua villosa, photographed by ALLIE BORGMEYER
fig. a ALLIE BORGMEYER, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-10 / obs. 196609570

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
02457009
Filed as
Fatoua villosa (Thunb.) Nakai
Det. by
D. E. Atha 2015-01-01
Collected
D. E. Atha 2014-09-10
Origin
US
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 23 botanical countries

Regions where Fatoua villosa is native: China South-Central, China Southeast, Hainan, Japan, Korea, Nansei-shoto, Taiwan, Bismarck Archipelago, Borneo, Jawa, Lesser Sunda Is., Malaya, Maluku, New Guinea, Philippines, Solomon Is., Sulawesi, Sumatera, Thailand, Vietnam, Northern Territory, Queensland, Western Australia China South-CentralChina SoutheastHainanJapanTaiwanBismarck ArchipelagoBorneoJawaLesser Sunda Is.MalayaMalukuNew GuineaPhilippinesSolomon Is.SulawesiSumateraThailandVietnamNorthern TerritoryQueenslandWestern Australia KoreaNansei-shoto
Native distribution of Fatoua villosa, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Bismarck Archipelago BIS ASIA-TROPICAL
Borneo BOR
Jawa JAW
Lesser Sunda Is. LSI
Malaya MLY
Maluku MOL
New Guinea NWG
Philippines PHI
Solomon Is. SOL
Sulawesi SUL
Sumatera SUM
Thailand THA
Vietnam VIE
China South-Central CHC ASIA-TEMPERATE
China Southeast CHS
Hainan CHH
Japan JAP
Korea KOR
Nansei-shoto NNS
Taiwan TAI
Northern Territory NTA AUSTRALASIA
Queensland QLD
Western Australia WAU

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 103 in flower of 181 examined

Proportion of examined Fatoua villosa in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 1 2 too few examined
Feb 0 0 too few examined
Mar 1 2 too few examined
Apr 3 8 38% 14% to 69%
May 2 6 33% 10% to 70%
Jun 15 18 83% 61% to 94%
Jul 11 28 39% 24% to 58%
Aug 26 31 84% 67% to 93%
Sep 18 29 62% 44% to 77%
Oct 15 34 44% 29% to 61%
Nov 9 16 56% 33% to 77%
Dec 2 7 29% 8% to 64%

Peak flowering in Aug. Each bar is the share of Fatoua villosa 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. 103 of 181 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 3 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 2,016 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -4.4 °C 2.3 °C 12.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 27.9 °C 31.2 °C 34.6 °C
Annual rainfall 889 mm 1,241 mm 2,384 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 138 mm 254 mm 388 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 2,016 research-grade observations of Fatoua villosa 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 12 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.

  • Boehmeriopsis pallida Kom.
  • Fatoua aspera Gaudich.
  • Fatoua cordata Gaudich.
  • Fatoua globulifera Miq.
  • Fatoua japonica (Thunb.) Blume
  • Fatoua lanceolata Decne.
  • Fatoua scabra Miq.
  • Fatoua subcordata Gaudich.
  • Fleurya glechomifolia Miq.
  • Fleurya globulifera Miq.
  • Fleurya scabra Miq.
  • Urtica villosa Thunb.

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.