Gossypium tomentosum (Hawai'ian cotton)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Gossypium tomentosum, photographed by Don Loarie — fig. a Don Loarie, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-22 / obs. 203672807

Gossypium tomentosum, photographed by Cricket Raspet — fig. b Cricket Raspet, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 180665133

Gossypium tomentosum, photographed by Kevin Faccenda — fig. c Kevin Faccenda, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 113331512

Gossypium tomentosum, photographed by Eric Knight — fig. e Eric Knight, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 55620513

Gossypium tomentosum, photographed by Sonny Gamponia — fig. f Sonny Gamponia, CC0 1.0 / obs. 37756215

Gossypium tomentosum, photographed by nebrooks — fig. h nebrooks, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204946833

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 1 botanical country

Native distribution of Gossypium tomentosum, 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
Hawaii	HAW	PACIFIC

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 427 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	17.3 °C	21.0 °C	21.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	24.8 °C	26.7 °C	29.4 °C
Annual rainfall	523 mm	809 mm	2,531 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	57 mm	99 mm	471 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 427 research-grade observations of Gossypium tomentosum 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 4 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.

Gossypium hirsutum f. tomentosum (Nutt. ex Seem.) Roberty
Gossypium parvifolium Nutt. ex Seem.
Gossypium sandvicense Parl.
Gossypium tomentosum var. parvifolium Nutt. ex G.Watt

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.