Ipomoea batatas (sweet potato)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Ipomoea batatas, photographed by Oscar Alejandro Morales Juárez — fig. a Oscar Alejandro Morales Juárez, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-04-30 / obs. 195422945

Ipomoea batatas, photographed by 葉子 — fig. b 葉子, CC0 1.0 / obs. 204379835

Ipomoea batatas, photographed by Ashwin Srinivasan — fig. c Ashwin Srinivasan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 174989865

Ipomoea batatas, photographed by Sabarni Sarker — fig. d Sabarni Sarker, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 172675143

Ipomoea batatas, photographed by Kevin Faccenda — fig. f Kevin Faccenda, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 167880931

Ipomoea batatas, photographed by Ong Jyh Seng — fig. h Ong Jyh Seng, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 158943193

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 14 botanical countries

Native distribution of Ipomoea batatas, 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
Belize	BLZ	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Colombia	CLM
Costa Rica	COS
Ecuador	ECU
El Salvador	ELS
Guatemala	GUA
Honduras	HON
Nicaragua	NIC
Panamá	PAN
Venezuela	VEN
Mexico Gulf	MXG	NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Northeast	MXE
Mexico Southeast	MXT
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.

Flowering 194 in flower of 229 examined

88%

91%

83%

89%

77%

60%

73%

57%

89%

92%

88%

93%

Proportion of examined Ipomoea batatas in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	28	32	88%	72% to 95%
Feb	21	23	91%	73% to 98%
Mar	15	18	83%	61% to 94%
Apr	17	19	89%	69% to 97%
May	17	22	77%	57% to 90%
Jun	3	5	60%	23% to 88%
Jul	8	11	73%	43% to 90%
Aug	8	14	57%	33% to 79%
Sep	8	9	89%	56% to 98%
Oct	22	24	92%	74% to 98%
Nov	21	24	88%	69% to 96%
Dec	26	28	93%	77% to 98%

Peak flowering in Dec. Each bar is the share of Ipomoea batatas 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. 194 of 229 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 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.

Also published as 41 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.

Batatas batatas (L.) H.Karst.
Batatas edulis (Thunb.) Choisy
Batatas edulis var. porphyrorhiza (Griseb.) Ram.Goyena
Batatas wallii C.Morren
Batatas xanthorhiza Bojer
Convolvulus apiculata M.Martens & Galeotti
Convolvulus attenuatus M.Martens & Galeotti
Convolvulus batata Vell.
Convolvulus batatas L.
Convolvulus campestris Vell.
Convolvulus edulis Thunb.
Convolvulus esculentus Salisb.
Convolvulus septangularis Steud.
Convolvulus tuberifer Steud.
Convolvulus tuxtlensis Sessé & Moc.
Convolvulus variabilis Schltdl. & Cham.
Convolvulus varius Vell.
Ipomoea apiculata M.Martens & Galeotti
Ipomoea batatas f. trifida Moldenke
Ipomoea batatas var. dissoluta Kuntze
Ipomoea batatas var. edulis (Thunb.) Makino
Ipomoea batatas var. erythrorrhiza (Voigt) M.R.Almeida
Ipomoea batatas var. fastigiata (Sweet) Kuntze
Ipomoea batatas var. leucorrhiza Griseb.

and 17 more.

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.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.