Macaranga tanariusMüll.Arg.

parasol leaf tree

WFO wfo-0000232270 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Macaranga tanarius, photographed by 五色鳥
fig. a 五色鳥, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-12 / obs. 205385613

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
The New York Botanical Garden
Accession
190017
Filed as
Macaranga tanarius (L.) Müll.Arg.
Det. by
C. T. Imada 1997-01-01
Collected
C. R. Annable 1996-11-11
Origin
US
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

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 24 botanical countries

Regions where Macaranga tanarius is native: China Southeast, Nansei-shoto, Taiwan, Andaman Is., Bismarck Archipelago, Borneo, Christmas I., Jawa, Lesser Sunda Is., Maluku, Myanmar, New Guinea, Nicobar Is., Philippines, Solomon Is., Sulawesi, Sumatera, Thailand, Vietnam, New South Wales, Northern Territory, Queensland, Marshall Is., Vanuatu China SoutheastTaiwanBismarck ArchipelagoBorneoJawaLesser Sunda Is.MalukuMyanmarNew GuineaPhilippinesSolomon Is.SulawesiSumateraThailandVietnamNew South WalesNorthern TerritoryQueensland Nansei-shotoAndaman Is.Christmas I.Nicobar Is.Marshall Is.Vanuatu
Native distribution of Macaranga tanarius, 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
Andaman Is. AND ASIA-TROPICAL
Bismarck Archipelago BIS
Borneo BOR
Christmas I. XMS
Jawa JAW
Lesser Sunda Is. LSI
Maluku MOL
Myanmar MYA
New Guinea NWG
Nicobar Is. NCB
Philippines PHI
Solomon Is. SOL
Sulawesi SUL
Sumatera SUM
Thailand THA
Vietnam VIE
China Southeast CHS ASIA-TEMPERATE
Nansei-shoto NNS
Taiwan TAI
New South Wales NSW AUSTRALASIA
Northern Territory NTA
Queensland QLD
Marshall Is. MRS PACIFIC
Vanuatu VAN

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 160 in flower of 521 examined

Proportion of examined Macaranga tanarius in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 5 26 19% 9% to 38%
Feb 17 54 31% 21% to 45%
Mar 24 42 57% 42% to 71%
Apr 54 111 49% 40% to 58%
May 13 59 22% 13% to 34%
Jun 1 59 2% 0% to 9%
Jul 4 21 19% 8% to 40%
Aug 5 21 24% 11% to 45%
Sep 7 27 26% 13% to 45%
Oct 10 32 31% 18% to 49%
Nov 10 32 31% 18% to 49%
Dec 10 37 27% 15% to 43%

Peak flowering in Mar. Each bar is the share of Macaranga tanarius 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. 160 of 521 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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 2,025 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 10.4 °C 13.4 °C 20.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 26.1 °C 29.8 °C 31.1 °C
Annual rainfall 1,071 mm 2,142 mm 3,821 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 57 mm 114 mm 628 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 2,025 research-grade observations of Macaranga tanarius 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 15 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.

  • Croton laccifer Blanco
  • Croton lacciferus Blanco
  • Macaranga molliuscula Kurz
  • Macaranga tanarius var. brevibracteata Müll.Arg.
  • Macaranga tanarius var. genuina Mull.Arg.
  • Macaranga tanarius var. glabra F.Muell.
  • Macaranga tanarius var. tomentosa (Blume) Mull.Arg.
  • Macaranga tomentosa (Blume) Druce
  • Macaranga vulcanica Elmer ex Merr.
  • Mappa moluccana Wight
  • Mappa tanarius (L.) Blume
  • Mappa tomentosa Blume
  • Ricinus tanarius L.
  • Rottlera tanarius (L.) Hassk.
  • Rottlera tomentosa (Blume) Hassk.

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.