Heliconia richardiana

Plate 1 figs. a–e · 5 separate observations

Heliconia richardiana, photographed by Gerry van Tonder — fig. b Gerry van Tonder, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 63578658

Heliconia richardiana, photographed by Guillaume Delaitre — fig. c Guillaume Delaitre, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 175303707

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: The New York Botanical Garden
Accession: 684917
Filed as: Heliconia richardiana Miq.
Det. by: P. J. M. Maas 2001-01-01
Collected: R. de Mello-Silva 1996-06-19
Origin: BR
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 7 botanical countries

Native distribution of Heliconia richardiana, 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
Brazil North	BZN	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Brazil Northeast	BZE
Brazil Southeast	BZL
French Guiana	FRG
Guyana	GUY
Suriname	SUR
Venezuela	VEN

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 107 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	17.6 °C	21.8 °C	23.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	28.3 °C	31.4 °C	32.9 °C
Annual rainfall	1,281 mm	2,656 mm	3,632 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	136 mm	277 mm	367 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 107 research-grade observations of Heliconia richardiana 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 2 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.

Bihai glauca Kuntze
Heliconia glauca Poit.

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.