Inga spectabilis(Vahl) Willd.

WFO wfo-0000173672 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 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.

Inga spectabilis, photographed by Alison Guerra
fig. a Alison Guerra, CC BY 4.0 / 2020-04-26 / obs. 69455386
Inga spectabilis, photographed by Lena Struwe
fig. b Lena Struwe, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 2819128
Inga spectabilis, photographed by Ashwin Srinivasan
fig. c Ashwin Srinivasan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 173546458
Inga spectabilis, photographed by ldgc
fig. d ldgc, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 171493745
Inga spectabilis, photographed by Ashwin Srinivasan
fig. e Ashwin Srinivasan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 173546475
Inga spectabilis, photographed by ldgc
fig. f ldgc, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 171493921
Inga spectabilis, photographed by ldgc
fig. g ldgc, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 171494072
Inga spectabilis, photographed by ldgc
fig. h ldgc, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 171494181

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
Smithsonian, US National Herbarium
Accession
US 3487157
Filed as
Inga spectabilis (Vahl) Willd.
Det. by
Liesner, R. L.
Collected
P. M. Peterson & C. R. Annable 1989-02-16
Origin
PA
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC0 1.0)

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 11 botanical countries

Regions where Inga spectabilis is native: Mexico Southeast, Mexico Southwest, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Galápagos, Nicaragua, Panamá, Peru, Venezuela Mexico SoutheastMexico SouthwestBoliviaColombiaCosta RicaEcuadorNicaraguaPanamáPeruVenezuela Galápagos
Native distribution of Inga spectabilis, 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
Bolivia BOL SOUTHERN AMERICA
Colombia CLM
Costa Rica COS
Ecuador ECU
Galápagos GAL
Nicaragua NIC
Panamá PAN
Peru PER
Venezuela VEN
Mexico Southeast MXT NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Southwest MXS

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 92 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 15.5 °C 20.4 °C 23.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 23.6 °C 28.6 °C 31.7 °C
Annual rainfall 926 mm 3,027 mm 4,723 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 47 mm 256 mm 720 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 92 research-grade observations of Inga spectabilis 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 10 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.

  • Feuilleea heteroptera (Benth.) Kuntze
  • Feuilleea spectabilis (Vahl) Kuntze
  • Inga fulgens Kunth
  • Inga heteroptera Benth.
  • Inga lucida Kunth
  • Inga schimpffii Harms
  • Inga smithii Britton
  • Inga spectabilis var. schimpfii (Harms) Little
  • Inga spectabilis var. spectabilis
  • Mimosa spectabilis Vahl

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.