Heliotropium ramosissimumSieber ex DC.

wavy heliotrope

WFO wfo-0000718874 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Heliotropium ramosissimum, photographed by Alessia Guggisberg
fig. a Alessia Guggisberg, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-04 / obs. 203297779
Heliotropium ramosissimum, photographed by John Lyden
fig. b John Lyden, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 179317877
Heliotropium ramosissimum, photographed by Christian Berg
fig. c Christian Berg, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 173759855
Heliotropium ramosissimum, photographed by Thibaud Aronson
fig. d Thibaud Aronson, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 158209679
Heliotropium ramosissimum, photographed by Santiago Martín-Bravo
fig. e Santiago Martín-Bravo, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 152046258
Heliotropium ramosissimum, photographed by Óscar Sampedro
fig. f Óscar Sampedro, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 141291951
Heliotropium ramosissimum, photographed by Julien Renoult
fig. g Julien Renoult, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 116042290
Heliotropium ramosissimum, photographed by Andre Hosper
fig. h Andre Hosper, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 59987716

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 21 botanical countries

Regions where Heliotropium ramosissimum is native: Burkina, Canary Is., Cape Verde, Chad, Djibouti, Egypt, Libya, Madeira, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Sudan-South Sudan, Afghanistan, Gulf States, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon-Syria, Saudi Arabia, Sinai, Turkmenistan, Yemen BurkinaChadDjiboutiEgyptLibyaMauritaniaNigerSenegalSudan-South SudanAfghanistanGulf StatesIranIraqLebanon-SyriaSaudi ArabiaSinaiTurkmenistanYemen Canary Is.Cape VerdeMadeira
Native distribution of Heliotropium ramosissimum, 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
Burkina BKN AFRICA
Canary Is. CNY
Cape Verde CVI
Chad CHA
Djibouti DJI
Egypt EGY
Libya LBY
Madeira MDR
Mauritania MTN
Niger NGR
Senegal SEN
Sudan-South Sudan SUD
Afghanistan AFG ASIA-TEMPERATE
Gulf States GST
Iran IRN
Iraq IRQ
Lebanon-Syria LBS
Saudi Arabia SAU
Sinai SIN
Turkmenistan TKM
Yemen YEM

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 57 in flower of 58 examined

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Heliotropium ramosissimum 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. 57 of 58 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 9 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. 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 776 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 13.8 °C 16.2 °C 18.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 22.5 °C 24.0 °C 27.1 °C
Annual rainfall 121 mm 180 mm 432 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 2 mm 3 mm 11 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 776 research-grade observations of Heliotropium ramosissimum 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 9 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.

  • Heliophytum kotschyi Bunge
  • Heliotropium affghanum Boiss.
  • Heliotropium assyricum Aucher ex DC.
  • Heliotropium balansae Riedl
  • Heliotropium eriocarpum Schimp. ex DC.
  • Heliotropium moroccanum G.Don
  • Heliotropium sarothroclados Bornm.
  • Heliotropium turcomanicum Popov & Korovin
  • Lithospermum hispidum Forssk.

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.