Mimosa castaL.

graceful mimosa

WFO wfo-0000174487 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.

Mimosa casta, photographed by ritirene
fig. a ritirene, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-12-18 / obs. 172990756
Mimosa casta, photographed by ritirene
fig. b ritirene, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 127772364
Mimosa casta, photographed by ritirene
fig. c ritirene, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 172990760
Mimosa casta, photographed by ritirene
fig. d ritirene, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 127772586
Mimosa casta, photographed by ritirene
fig. e ritirene, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 168488009
Mimosa casta, photographed by ritirene
fig. f ritirene, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 161615005
Mimosa casta, photographed by ritirene
fig. g ritirene, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 131847011
Mimosa casta, photographed by ritirene
fig. h ritirene, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 127790825

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 8 botanical countries

Regions where Mimosa casta is native: Brazil North, Colombia, Jamaica, Leeward Is., Panamá, Trinidad-Tobago, Venezuela, Windward Is. Brazil NorthColombiaJamaicaPanamáTrinidad-TobagoVenezuela Leeward Is.Windward Is.
Native distribution of Mimosa casta, 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
Brazil North BZN SOUTHERN AMERICA
Colombia CLM
Jamaica JAM
Leeward Is. LEE
Panamá PAN
Trinidad-Tobago TRT
Venezuela VEN
Windward Is. WIN

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 35 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 17.6 °C 21.4 °C 23.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 26.6 °C 28.7 °C 30.5 °C
Annual rainfall 1,620 mm 2,154 mm 2,563 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 229 mm 304 mm 413 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 35 research-grade observations of Mimosa casta 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 1 synonym

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.

  • Mimosa dominiciana Desv.

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.