Hibiscus praeteritusR.A.Dyer

WFO wfo-0000722934 Accepted WFO 2026-06 5 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–e · 4 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 4 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.

Hibiscus praeteritus, photographed by James Deacon
fig. a James Deacon, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2021-02-20 / obs. 116376470
Hibiscus praeteritus, photographed by James Deacon
fig. b James Deacon, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 116376471
Hibiscus praeteritus, photographed by Robert Taylor
fig. c Robert Taylor, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 15675383
Hibiscus praeteritus, photographed by Margaret Burger
fig. d Margaret Burger, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 174125595
Hibiscus praeteritus, photographed by Nic Knott-Craig
fig. e Nic Knott-Craig, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 181066393

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 7 botanical countries

Regions where Hibiscus praeteritus is native: Angola, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Northern Provinces, Zimbabwe AngolaBotswanaMalawiMozambiqueNamibiaNorthern ProvincesZimbabwe
Native distribution of Hibiscus praeteritus, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Angola ANG AFRICA
Botswana BOT
Malawi MLW
Mozambique MOZ
Namibia NAM
Northern Provinces TVL
Zimbabwe ZIM

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 38 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 6.2 °C 9.8 °C 11.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 27.2 °C 30.1 °C 31.3 °C
Annual rainfall 483 mm 616 mm 929 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 10 mm 21 mm 47 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 38 research-grade observations of Hibiscus praeteritus 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.

  • Hibiscus hirtus subsp. africanus Cufod.
  • Hibiscus micranthus var. hispidus Cufod.

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. 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.