Loeselia ciliataL.

WFO wfo-0000444197 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 6 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 6 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.

Loeselia ciliata, photographed by Alexis López Hernández
fig. a Alexis López Hernández, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-01-05 / obs. 109362595
Loeselia ciliata, photographed by Neptalí Ramírez Marcial
fig. b Neptalí Ramírez Marcial, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 113516053
Loeselia ciliata, photographed by Neptalí Ramírez Marcial
fig. c Neptalí Ramírez Marcial, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 29299500
Loeselia ciliata, photographed by Neptalí Ramírez Marcial
fig. d Neptalí Ramírez Marcial, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 29299496
Loeselia ciliata, photographed by Neptalí Ramírez Marcial
fig. e Neptalí Ramírez Marcial, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 6086618
Loeselia ciliata, photographed by Neptalí Ramírez Marcial
fig. f Neptalí Ramírez Marcial, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 30500174
Loeselia ciliata, photographed by Neptalí Ramírez Marcial
fig. g Neptalí Ramírez Marcial, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 113516066
Loeselia ciliata, photographed by Neptalí Ramírez Marcial
fig. h Neptalí Ramírez Marcial, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 29299504

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 11 botanical countries

Regions where Loeselia ciliata is native: Mexico Gulf, Mexico Northeast, Mexico Northwest, Mexico Southeast, Mexico Southwest, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panamá Mexico GulfMexico NortheastMexico NorthwestMexico SoutheastMexico SouthwestCosta RicaEl SalvadorGuatemalaHondurasNicaraguaPanamá
Native distribution of Loeselia ciliata, 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
Costa Rica COS SOUTHERN AMERICA
El Salvador ELS
Guatemala GUA
Honduras HON
Nicaragua NIC
Panamá PAN
Mexico Gulf MXG NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Northeast MXE
Mexico Northwest MXN
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 208 in flower of 215 examined

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Loeselia ciliata 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. 208 of 215 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 4 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 234 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 10.2 °C 12.4 °C 17.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 30.0 °C 32.8 °C 35.4 °C
Annual rainfall 339 mm 494 mm 1,050 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 2 mm 4 mm 20 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 234 research-grade observations of Loeselia ciliata 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 8 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.

  • Hoitzia aristata Kunth
  • Hoitzia loeselia Spreng.
  • Hoitzia lupulina Hook. & Arn.
  • Loeselia aristata (Kunth) G.Don
  • Loeselia ciliata subsp. echinophylla (Brand) J.M.Porter & L.A.Johnson
  • Loeselia ciliata var. echinophylla Brand
  • Loeselia involucrata G.Don
  • Phlox involucrata Sessé & Moc.

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.