Oxalis bisfracta

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Oxalis bisfracta, photographed by Jason Grant — fig. f Jason Grant, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 6775967

Oxalis bisfracta, photographed by Alfredo F. Fuentes Claros — fig. g Alfredo F. Fuentes Claros, CC0 1.0 / obs. 34632432

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: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Accession: K000531708
Filed as: Oxalis bisfracta Turcz.
Det. by: Eiten, G.
Collected: Bang, M. 1890-01-01
Origin: BO
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. We link to the digitised sheet rather than rehosting it, because the holding institutions do not serve their images to third parties reliably and we are not going to show you a picture we cannot actually deliver. 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 sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 4 botanical countries

Native distribution of Oxalis bisfracta, 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
Argentina Northwest	AGW	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Bolivia	BOL
Chile Central	CLC
Ecuador	ECU

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 39 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-2.8 °C	0.9 °C	3.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	10.5 °C	14.7 °C	16.4 °C
Annual rainfall	769 mm	1,778 mm	2,545 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	16 mm	50 mm	355 mm

It is found where winters bring light frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 39 research-grade observations of Oxalis bisfracta 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 4 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.

Oxalis breviramulosa Rusby
Oxalis guaquiensis R.Knuth
Xanthoxalis biflexa Rusby
Xanthoxalis breviramulosa (Rusby) Holub

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.