Hypoestes aristata

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Hypoestes aristata, photographed by Shaun Swanepoel — fig. c Shaun Swanepoel, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 189222113

Hypoestes aristata, photographed by Tony Rebelo — fig. d Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 189183013

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 23 botanical countries

Native distribution of Hypoestes aristata, 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
Burkina	BKN	AFRICA
Burundi	BUR
Cameroon	CMN
Cape Provinces	CPP
Central African Republic	CAF
Chad	CHA
DR Congo	ZAI
Eswatini	SWZ
Ethiopia	ETH
Gabon	GAB
Gulf of Guinea Is.	GGI
Ivory Coast	IVO
Kenya	KEN
KwaZulu-Natal	NAT
Malawi	MLW
Mozambique	MOZ
Nigeria	NGA
Northern Provinces	TVL
Sudan-South Sudan	SUD
Tanzania	TAN
Uganda	UGA
Zambia	ZAM
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.

Flowering 243 in flower of 260 examined

95%

97%

98%

93%

100%

91%

50%

100%

71%

Proportion of examined Hypoestes aristata in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	2	4	too few examined
Feb	2	3	too few examined
Mar	21	22	95%	78% to 99%
Apr	89	92	97%	91% to 99%
May	80	82	98%	92% to 99%
Jun	14	15	93%	70% to 99%
Jul	9	9	100%	70% to 100%
Aug	10	11	91%	62% to 98%
Sep	0	0	too few examined
Oct	4	8	50%	22% to 78%
Nov	7	7	100%	65% to 100%
Dec	5	7	71%	36% to 92%

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Hypoestes aristata 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. 243 of 260 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 3 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 1,250 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	6.7 °C	11.3 °C	14.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	21.1 °C	24.3 °C	27.6 °C
Annual rainfall	567 mm	879 mm	1,418 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	53 mm	110 mm	220 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 1,250 research-grade observations of Hypoestes aristata 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 19 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.

Diapedium verticillare (L.f.) Kuntze
Dicliptera jussiaei Webb
Dicliptera verticillaris (L.f.) Juss.
Hypoestes antennifera S.Moore
Hypoestes aristata var. alba K.Balkwill
Hypoestes aristata var. insularis (T.Anderson) Benoist
Hypoestes aristata var. kikuyensis Benoist
Hypoestes aristata var. letestui Benoist
Hypoestes aristata var. macrophylla Nees
Hypoestes aristata var. staudtii (Lindau) Benoist
Hypoestes clinopodia E.Mey. ex Nees
Hypoestes insularis T.Anderson
Hypoestes plumosa E.Mey.
Hypoestes polymorpha E.Mey.
Hypoestes staudtii Lindau
Hypoestes verticillaris (L.f.) Sol. ex Roem. & Schult.
Hypoestes verticillaris var. modesta Benoist
Justicia aristata Vahl
Justicia verticillaris L.f.

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.