Geitonoplesium cymosum (Scrambling Lily)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Geitonoplesium cymosum, photographed by Greg Tasney — fig. a Greg Tasney, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-06-13 / obs. 205977588

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 12 botanical countries

Native distribution of Geitonoplesium cymosum, 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
Bismarck Archipelago	BIS	ASIA-TROPICAL
Lesser Sunda Is.	LSI
Maluku	MOL
New Guinea	NWG
Solomon Is.	SOL
New South Wales	NSW	AUSTRALASIA
Norfolk Is.	NFK
Queensland	QLD
Victoria	VIC
Fiji	FIJ	PACIFIC
New Caledonia	NWC
Vanuatu	VAN

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 136 in flower of 421 examined

34%

14%

21%

12%

13%

27%

73%

64%

49%

33%

Proportion of examined Geitonoplesium cymosum in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	12	35	34%	21% to 51%
Feb	4	29	14%	6% to 31%
Mar	7	33	21%	11% to 38%
Apr	1	35	3%	1% to 15%
May	0	32	0%	0% to 11%
Jun	4	33	12%	5% to 27%
Jul	3	24	13%	4% to 31%
Aug	7	26	27%	14% to 46%
Sep	38	52	73%	60% to 83%
Oct	28	44	64%	49% to 76%
Nov	19	39	49%	34% to 64%
Dec	13	39	33%	21% to 49%

Peak flowering in Sep. Each bar is the share of Geitonoplesium cymosum 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. 136 of 421 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 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 2,014 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	5.4 °C	9.8 °C	13.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	23.8 °C	27.6 °C	29.7 °C
Annual rainfall	818 mm	1,140 mm	1,700 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	98 mm	144 mm	225 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 2,014 research-grade observations of Geitonoplesium cymosum 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.

Eustrephus timorensis Ridl.
Geitonoplesium asperum A.Cunn.
Geitonoplesium cymosum f. album Schlittler
Geitonoplesium cymosum f. rubellum Schlittler
Geitonoplesium cymosum subsp. angustifolium Schlittler
Geitonoplesium cymosum subsp. asperum (A.Cunn. ex R.Br.) Schlittler
Geitonoplesium cymosum subsp. macrophyllum Schlittler
Geitonoplesium cymosum var. laxiflorum (Hallier f.) Schlittler
Geitonoplesium cymosum var. paniculatum Schlittler
Geitonoplesium cymosum var. timorense (Ridl.) Schlittler
Geitonoplesium montanum (R.Br.) Kunth
Geitonoplesium montanum (R.Br.) Hook.
Luzuriaga cymosa R.Br.
Luzuriaga laxiflora Hallier f.
Luzuriaga montana R.Br.
Luzuriaga timorensis (Ridl.) Hallier f.
Medeola angustifolia Delile

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.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. 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.