Filicium decipiens (Ferntree)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Filicium decipiens, photographed by Kevin Faccenda — fig. a Kevin Faccenda, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-01-23 / obs. 177512657

Filicium decipiens, photographed by Lsf — fig. b Lsf, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 170851645

Filicium decipiens, photographed by P Jeganathan — fig. c P Jeganathan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 46249323

Filicium decipiens, photographed by Ong Jyh Seng — fig. d Ong Jyh Seng, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 31431184

Filicium decipiens, photographed by Stuart Cable — fig. e Stuart Cable, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 14027567

Filicium decipiens, photographed by Karthik Thrikkadeeri — fig. g Karthik Thrikkadeeri, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 177530469

Filicium decipiens, photographed by Siddarth Machado — fig. h Siddarth Machado, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 76301469

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 10 botanical countries

Native distribution of Filicium decipiens, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Comoros	COM	AFRICA
Ethiopia	ETH
Kenya	KEN
Madagascar	MDG
Malawi	MLW
Mozambique	MOZ
Tanzania	TAN
Zimbabwe	ZIM
India	IND	ASIA-TROPICAL
Sri Lanka	SRL

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 288 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	9.2 °C	19.7 °C	21.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	24.7 °C	27.4 °C	33.9 °C
Annual rainfall	792 mm	1,103 mm	2,867 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	10 mm	134 mm	509 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 288 research-grade observations of Filicium decipiens 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 5 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.

Filicium decipiens f. apterum Capuron
Filicium elongatum Radlk. ex Taub.
Jurighas decipiens (Wight & Arn.) Kuntze
Pteridophyllum decipiens (Wight & Arn.) Thwaites
Rhus decipiens Wight & Arn.

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.
USDA PLANTS Database. common name, checklist symbol FIDE2. public domain. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.