Furcraea hexapetala(Jacq.) Urb.

Cuban hemp

WFO wfo-0000768270 Accepted WFO 2026-06 6 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–f · 4 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 4 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.

Furcraea hexapetala, photographed by John G. Phillips
fig. a John G. Phillips, CC BY 4.0 / 2019-06-12 / obs. 66900031
Furcraea hexapetala, photographed by John G. Phillips
fig. b John G. Phillips, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 66760656
Furcraea hexapetala, photographed by John G. Phillips
fig. c John G. Phillips, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 142041817
Furcraea hexapetala, photographed by Eric Knight
fig. d Eric Knight, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 63225555
Furcraea hexapetala, photographed by Eric Knight
fig. e Eric Knight, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 63225563
Furcraea hexapetala, photographed by John G. Phillips
fig. f John G. Phillips, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 142041832

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 758266
Filed as
Furcraea hexapetala (Jacq.) Urb.
Det. by
García-Mendoza, A.
Collected
S. Brown 1908-02-10
Origin
BM
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 13 botanical countries

Regions where Furcraea hexapetala is native: Mexico Southeast, Bahamas, Bermuda, Cayman Is., Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Galápagos, Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad-Tobago, Turks-Caicos Is., Venezuela Mexico SoutheastCubaDominican RepublicEcuadorHaitiJamaicaTrinidad-TobagoVenezuela BahamasBermudaCayman Is.GalápagosTurks-Caicos Is.
Native distribution of Furcraea hexapetala, 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
Bahamas BAH SOUTHERN AMERICA
Bermuda BER
Cayman Is. CAY
Cuba CUB
Dominican Republic DOM
Ecuador ECU
Galápagos GAL
Haiti HAI
Jamaica JAM
Trinidad-Tobago TRT
Turks-Caicos Is. TCI
Venezuela VEN
Mexico Southeast MXT NORTHERN AMERICA

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 40 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 19.8 °C 20.0 °C 20.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 24.6 °C 27.1 °C 27.7 °C
Annual rainfall 799 mm 1,684 mm 2,343 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 80 mm 162 mm 215 mm

It is not found anywhere that gets close to freezing. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 40 research-grade observations of Furcraea hexapetala 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 13 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.

  • Agave aspera Jacq.
  • Agave australis (Haw.) Steud.
  • Agave cubensis Jacq.
  • Agave hexapetala Jacq.
  • Agave odorata Pers.
  • Agave vivipara Arruda
  • Furcraea agavephylla Brot. ex Schult.
  • Furcraea aspera (Jacq.) M.Roem.
  • Furcraea cahum Trel.
  • Furcraea cubensis (Jacq.) Vent.
  • Furcraea cubensis var. inermis Baker
  • Furcraea macrophylla Baker
  • Furcraea valleculata Jacobi

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.