Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations
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
- 43988
- Filed as
- Ficus sur Forssk.
- Det. by
- C. R. Annable 1995-01-01
- Collected
- C. R. Annable 1995-08-07
- 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 42 botanical countries
| Region | TDWG code | Continent |
|---|---|---|
| Angola | ANG | AFRICA |
| Benin | BEN | |
| Botswana | BOT | |
| Burkina | BKN | |
| Burundi | BUR | |
| Cameroon | CMN | |
| Cape Provinces | CPP | |
| Cape Verde | CVI | |
| Caprivi Strip | CPV | |
| Central African Republic | CAF | |
| Chad | CHA | |
| Congo | CON | |
| DR Congo | ZAI | |
| Eritrea | ERI | |
| Eswatini | SWZ | |
| Ethiopia | ETH | |
| Gabon | GAB | |
| Gambia | GAM | |
| Ghana | GHA | |
| Guinea | GUI | |
| Guinea-Bissau | GNB | |
| Gulf of Guinea Is. | GGI | |
| Ivory Coast | IVO | |
| Kenya | KEN | |
| KwaZulu-Natal | NAT | |
| Liberia | LBR | |
| Malawi | MLW | |
| Mali | MLI | |
| Mozambique | MOZ | |
| Namibia | NAM | |
| Nigeria | NGA | |
| Northern Provinces | TVL | |
| Rwanda | RWA | |
| Senegal | SEN | |
| Sierra Leone | SIE | |
| Sudan-South Sudan | SUD | |
| Tanzania | TAN | |
| Togo | TOG | |
| Uganda | UGA | |
| Zambia | ZAM | |
| Zimbabwe | ZIM | |
| Yemen | YEM | ASIA-TEMPERATE |
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.
Where it actually grows measured, from 1,723 observations
| Condition | 5th percentile | Median | 95th percentile |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coldest month, mean daily low | 4.4 °C | 10.3 °C | 15.2 °C |
| Warmest month, mean daily high | 21.6 °C | 25.8 °C | 29.5 °C |
| Annual rainfall | 592 mm | 941 mm | 1,251 mm |
| Rainfall in the driest quarter | 11 mm | 94 mm | 176 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 1,723 research-grade observations of Ficus sur 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.
Also published as 26 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.
- Ficus beniensis De Wild.
- Ficus brassii R.Br. ex Sabine
- Ficus capensis Thunb.
- Ficus capensis var. guineensis Hiern
- Ficus capensis var. trichoneura Warb.
- Ficus clethrophylla Hiern
- Ficus erubescens Warb.
- Ficus gongoensis De Wild.
- Ficus guineensis (Miq.) Stapf
- Ficus ituriensis De Wild.
- Ficus kondeensis Warb.
- Ficus lichtensteinii Link
- Ficus mallotocarpa Warb.
- Ficus munsae Warb.
- Ficus ostiolata De Wild.
- Ficus panifica Delile
- Ficus plateiocarpa Warb.
- Ficus riparia Hochst. ex Miq.
- Ficus stellulata var. glabrescens Warb.
- Ficus thonningiana (Miq.) Miq.
- Ficus villosipes Warb.
- Sycomorus capensis (Thunb.) Miq.
- Sycomorus guineensis Miq.
- Sycomorus panifica Miq.
and 2 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.