Gentianella foliosa

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 6 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 6 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.

Gentianella foliosa, photographed by Robert Webster — fig. a Robert Webster, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2009-03-07 / obs. 62219411

Gentianella foliosa, photographed by Ignacio Moreira-Corral — fig. b Ignacio Moreira-Corral, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 170856355

Gentianella foliosa, photographed by Michael Bakker Paiva — fig. c Michael Bakker Paiva, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 12899221

Gentianella foliosa, photographed by Christian Manke — fig. f Christian Manke, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 181464272

Gentianella foliosa, photographed by Ben Pritchard — fig. g Ben Pritchard, CC0 1.0 / obs. 187223392

Gentianella foliosa, photographed by Diego Inclan — fig. h Diego Inclan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 56079467

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: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Accession: K000450815
Filed as: Gentianella foliosa (Kunth) Fabris
Det. by: Nicki Biggs
Collected: Jaramillo, J.
Origin: EC
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 1 botanical country

Native distribution of Gentianella foliosa, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Ecuador	ECU	SOUTHERN 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 178 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	0.1 °C	2.1 °C	3.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	9.5 °C	10.9 °C	12.2 °C
Annual rainfall	1,879 mm	2,610 mm	2,924 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	195 mm	235 mm	348 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 178 research-grade observations of Gentianella foliosa 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 10 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.

Gentiana androtricha Gilg
Gentiana coarctata Willd. ex Schult.
Gentiana diffusa var. major Benth.
Gentiana foliosa Kunth
Gentiana foliosa var. humilis Griseb.
Gentiana foliosa var. laxa Griseb.
Gentiana stellarioides Griseb.
Gentianella spruceana Fabris
Gentianella stellarioides (Griseb.) Fabris
Gentianella stellarioides var. androtricha (Gilg) T.N.Ho

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.