Ochna pulchra | BotanAI

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Ochna pulchra, photographed by Matthew Fainman — fig. a Matthew Fainman, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-09-24 / obs. 159342272

Ochna pulchra, photographed by Henry de Lange — fig. f Henry de Lange, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 86348147

Ochna pulchra, photographed by Tony Rebelo — fig. g Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 59108685

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 11 botanical countries

Native distribution of Ochna pulchra, 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
Angola	ANG	AFRICA
Botswana	BOT
Caprivi Strip	CPV
Congo	CON
DR Congo	ZAI
Gabon	GAB
Mozambique	MOZ
Namibia	NAM
Northern Provinces	TVL
Zambia	ZAM
Zimbabwe	ZIM

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 611 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	3.3 °C	4.9 °C	9.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	25.9 °C	27.2 °C	31.0 °C
Annual rainfall	497 mm	686 mm	764 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	8 mm	17 mm	21 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 611 research-grade observations of Ochna pulchra 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 Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.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 18 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.

Diporidium pulchrum (Hook.) Walp.
Diporidium quangense (Büttner) Kuntze
Ochna aschersoniana Schinz
Ochna fuscescens Heine
Ochna hoffmannii-ottonis Engl.
Ochna huillensis Engl. ex Tiegh.
Ochna quangensis Büttner
Ochna rehmannii Szyszył.
Polythecium pulchrum (Hook.) Tiegh.
Polythecium rehmannii Tiegh.
Porochna antunesii Tiegh.
Porochna aschersoniana (Schinz) Tiegh.
Porochna bifolia Tiegh.
Porochna brunnescens Tiegh.
Porochna davilliflora Tiegh.
Porochna hoffmanni-ottonis Tiegh.
Porochna huillensis Tiegh.
Porochna quangensis (Büttner) Tiegh.

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.