Maytenus orbicularis

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Maytenus orbicularis, photographed by Victor E. Chocho — fig. b Victor E. Chocho, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 49246037

Maytenus orbicularis, photographed by Jim Morefield — fig. c Jim Morefield, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 57490970

Maytenus orbicularis, photographed by Carrie Seltzer — fig. e Carrie Seltzer, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 32253551

Maytenus orbicularis, photographed by Leonel Roget — fig. f Leonel Roget, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 29532255

Maytenus orbicularis, photographed by Eric Knight — fig. g Eric Knight, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 11707219

Maytenus orbicularis, photographed by Julien Renoult — fig. h Julien Renoult, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 12790430

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 3 botanical countries

Native distribution of Maytenus orbicularis, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Ecuador	ECU	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Galápagos	GAL
Peru	PER

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 521 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	17.5 °C	20.5 °C	20.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	25.8 °C	27.3 °C	29.7 °C
Annual rainfall	162 mm	897 mm	1,677 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	4 mm	90 mm	177 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 521 research-grade observations of Maytenus orbicularis 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 13 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.

Celastrus circumcissus Pav.
Celastrus octogonus L'Hér.
Celastrus orbicularis Humb. & Bonpl. ex Schult.
Maytenus obovata Hook.f.
Maytenus octogona (L'Hér.) DC.
Maytenus uliginosa Kunth
Rhamnus peruviana hort. ex Lam.
Rhamnus peruvianus Lam.
Senacia octogona Lam.
Tricerma obovatum (Hook.f.) Lundell
Tricerma octogonum (L'Hér.) Lundell
Tricerma orbiculare (Humb. & Bonpl. ex Schult.) Lundell
Ziziphus peruviana Lam.

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.
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.