Jarava plumosa (South American rice grass)

Plate 1 figs. a–f · 3 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 3 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.

Jarava plumosa, photographed by Josep Gesti — fig. a Josep Gesti, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2019-02-20 / obs. 31813698

Jarava plumosa, photographed by Hugo Hulsberg — fig. b Hugo Hulsberg, CC0 1.0 / obs. 156474288

Jarava plumosa, photographed by Oriol Sastre — fig. d Oriol Sastre, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205540388

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 3754405
Filed as: Jarava plumosa (Spreng.) S.W.L.Jacobs & J.Everett
Det. by: Renvoize, S. A.
Collected: P. M. Peterson & C. R. Annable 1992-03-22
Origin: BO
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 7 botanical countries

Native distribution of Jarava plumosa, 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
Argentina Northeast	AGE	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Argentina Northwest	AGW
Argentina South	AGS
Brazil South	BZS
Chile Central	CLC
Chile South	CLS
Uruguay	URU

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 36 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	2.4 °C	4.4 °C	8.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	25.9 °C	27.7 °C	30.5 °C
Annual rainfall	474 mm	895 mm	1,193 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	31 mm	113 mm	181 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 36 research-grade observations of Jarava plumosa 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 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.

Achnatherum papposum (Nees) Barkworth
Arundo plumosa (Spreng.) Schult. & Schult.f.
Calamagrostis plumosa Spreng.
Stipa delilei Steud.
Stipa papposa Nees
Stipa papposa Delile
Stipa papposa f. major Speg.
Stipa papposa f. minor Speg.
Stipa tenuiflora Phil.

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.