Nicotiana repandaWilld.

fiddleleaf tobacco

WFO wfo-0001023933 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Nicotiana repanda, photographed by Center for Urban Ecology
fig. a Center for Urban Ecology, CC0 1.0 / 2022-05-11 / obs. 197064699

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
02111177
Filed as
Nicotiana repanda Willd. ex Lehm.
Det. by
D. E. Atha 2013-01-01
Collected
D. E. Atha 2012-09-05
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.

Flowering 274 in flower of 290 examined

Proportion of examined Nicotiana repanda in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 11 12 92% 65% to 99%
Feb 27 27 100% 88% to 100%
Mar 52 56 93% 83% to 97%
Apr 78 84 93% 85% to 97%
May 39 42 93% 81% to 98%
Jun 14 14 100% 78% to 100%
Jul 4 4 too few examined
Aug 3 3 too few examined
Sep 2 2 too few examined
Oct 16 16 100% 81% to 100%
Nov 14 16 88% 64% to 97%
Dec 14 14 100% 78% to 100%

Peak flowering in Feb. Each bar is the share of Nicotiana repanda 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. 274 of 290 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 3 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 919 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 4.7 °C 7.0 °C 13.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 31.7 °C 34.6 °C 36.2 °C
Annual rainfall 314 mm 714 mm 926 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 22 mm 108 mm 179 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 919 research-grade observations of Nicotiana repanda 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 9 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.

  • Eucapnia repanda (Willd. ex Lehm.) Raf.
  • Nicotiana doniana Dunal
  • Nicotiana lyrata Kunth
  • Nicotiana pusilla Sessé & Moc.
  • Nicotiana repanda Sims
  • Nicotiana repanda var. cuspidata Comes
  • Nicotiana repanda var. pandurata (Dunal ex DC.) Comes
  • Nicotiana repanda var. repanda
  • Nicotiana roemeriana Scheele

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.

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. It has no native range either: Kew's checklist does not cover this taxon.