Ocotea insularis(Meisn.) Mez

WFO wfo-0000382743 Accepted WFO 2026-06 3 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–c · 2 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 2 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.

Ocotea insularis, photographed by Ashwin Srinivasan
fig. a Ashwin Srinivasan, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-12-27 / obs. 174851371
Ocotea insularis, photographed by Lena Struwe
fig. b Lena Struwe, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 6740103
Ocotea insularis, photographed by Lena Struwe
fig. c Lena Struwe, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 6740106

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
01395398
Filed as
Ocotea insularis (Meisn.) Mez
Det. by
W. G. Vargas 2011-01-01
Collected
J. C. Betancur B. 2011-01-31
Origin
CO
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.

Native range 7 botanical countries

Regions where Ocotea insularis is native: Central American Pacific Is., Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panamá Central American Pacific Is.ColombiaCosta RicaEcuadorHondurasNicaraguaPanamá
Native distribution of Ocotea insularis, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Central American Pacific Is. CPI SOUTHERN AMERICA
Colombia CLM
Costa Rica COS
Ecuador ECU
Honduras HON
Nicaragua NIC
Panamá PAN

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.

Also published as 10 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.

  • Aiouea costaricensis (Mez) Kosterm.
  • Aiouea lundelliana C.K.Allen
  • Aiouea talamancensis W.C.Burger
  • Aiouea vexatrix van der Werff
  • Bellota costaricensis Mez
  • Boldu costaricensis (Mez) Kuntze
  • Boldus costaricensis (Mez) Kuntze
  • Ocotea floccifera Mez & Sodiro
  • Ocotea ira Mez & Pittier
  • Phoebe insularis Meisn.

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. 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.