Nolina parviflora

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Nolina parviflora, photographed by Oscar Alejandro Morales Juárez — fig. c Oscar Alejandro Morales Juárez, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 21509792

Nolina parviflora, photographed by Alexis López Hernández — fig. f Alexis López Hernández, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 13175834

Nolina parviflora, photographed by Erick Vélez Sánchez — fig. g Erick Vélez Sánchez, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 178946791

Nolina parviflora, photographed by Eugenio Padilla — fig. h Eugenio Padilla, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 79685121

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 4 botanical countries

Native distribution of Nolina parviflora, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Mexico Central	MXC	NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Gulf	MXG
Mexico Northeast	MXE
Mexico Southwest	MXS

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 256 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	2.0 °C	5.4 °C	8.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	19.8 °C	22.5 °C	26.7 °C
Annual rainfall	586 mm	763 mm	1,451 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	24 mm	34 mm	64 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 256 research-grade observations of Nolina parviflora 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 12 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.

Beaucarnea longifolia (Karw. ex Schult. & Schult.f.) Baker
Beaucarnea parviflora (Kunth) Baker
Cordyline parviflora Kunth
Dasylirion humboldtii Kunth
Dasylirion longifolium (Karw. ex Schult. & Schult.f.) Zucc.
Dracaena parviflora Willd. ex Schult. & Schult.f.
Nolina altamiranoana Rose
Nolina elegans Rose
Nolina longifolia (Karw. ex Schult. & Schult.f.) Hemsl.
Roulinia humboldtiana Brongn.
Roulinia karwinskiana Brongn.
Yucca longifolia Karw. ex Schult. & Schult.f.

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.