Ludwigia hirtellaRaf.

spindleroot

WFO wfo-0001087424 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Ludwigia hirtella, photographed by John Abrams
fig. a John Abrams, CC BY 4.0 / 2020-09-26 / obs. 97415378

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 3753126
Filed as
Ludwigia hirtella Raf.
Det. by
Strong, Mark T.
Collected
M. T. Strong & C. L. Kelloff 2021-09-08
Origin
US
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 17 botanical countries

Regions where Ludwigia hirtella is native: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia AlabamaArkansasFloridaGeorgiaKentuckyLouisianaMarylandMississippiNew JerseyNorth CarolinaOklahomaSouth CarolinaTennesseeTexasVirginia DelawareDistrict of Columbia
Native distribution of Ludwigia hirtella, 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
Alabama ALA NORTHERN AMERICA
Arkansas ARK
Delaware DEL
District of Columbia WDC
Florida FLA
Georgia GEO
Kentucky KTY
Louisiana LOU
Maryland MRY
Mississippi MSI
New Jersey NWJ
North Carolina NCA
Oklahoma OKL
South Carolina SCA
Tennessee TEN
Texas TEX
Virginia VRG

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 111 in flower of 140 examined

Proportion of examined Ludwigia hirtella in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 0 too few examined
Feb 0 0 too few examined
Mar 0 2 too few examined
Apr 1 3 too few examined
May 20 22 91% 72% to 97%
Jun 49 55 89% 78% to 95%
Jul 29 35 83% 67% to 92%
Aug 12 17 71% 47% to 87%
Sep 0 4 too few examined
Oct 0 2 too few examined
Nov 0 0 too few examined
Dec 0 0 too few examined

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Ludwigia hirtella 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. 111 of 140 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 8 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 275 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -1.8 °C 5.4 °C 7.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 29.6 °C 32.9 °C 33.8 °C
Annual rainfall 1,197 mm 1,439 mm 1,697 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 243 mm 285 mm 356 mm

It is found where winters bring light frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 275 research-grade observations of Ludwigia hirtella 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 6 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.

  • Isnardia hirsuta Hook. & Arn.
  • Isnardia hirsuta var. permollis (Barton) DC.
  • Isnardia hirtella Kuntze
  • Ludwigia hirsuta Pursh
  • Ludwigia permollis Bart.
  • Ludwigia pilosa Elliott

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. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. 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.