Oxalis hirta (tropical woodsorrel)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Oxalis hirta, photographed by De Waal Hugo — fig. a De Waal Hugo, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-29 / obs. 201573340

Oxalis hirta, photographed by Cricket Raspet — fig. d Cricket Raspet, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 171023125

Oxalis hirta, photographed by flamelily — fig. e flamelily, CC0 1.0 / obs. 146593158

Oxalis hirta, photographed by Jacques van der Merwe — fig. h Jacques van der Merwe, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 126639952

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 1 botanical country

Native distribution of Oxalis hirta, 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
Cape Provinces	CPP	AFRICA

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.

Flowering 1,071 in flower of 1,175 examined

91%

99%

98%

97%

78%

37%

26%

Proportion of examined Oxalis hirta in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	1	1	too few examined
Feb	0	0	too few examined
Mar	20	22	91%	72% to 97%
Apr	346	349	99%	98% to 100%
May	314	319	98%	96% to 99%
Jun	301	311	97%	94% to 98%
Jul	70	90	78%	68% to 85%
Aug	11	30	37%	22% to 54%
Sep	0	26	0%	0% to 13%
Oct	6	23	26%	13% to 46%
Nov	1	3	too few examined
Dec	1	1	too few examined

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Oxalis hirta 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. 1,071 of 1,175 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 4 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 1,370 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	5.5 °C	10.0 °C	12.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	19.7 °C	24.0 °C	31.0 °C
Annual rainfall	305 mm	768 mm	1,418 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	22 mm	68 mm	133 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 1,370 research-grade observations of Oxalis hirta 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 21 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.

Acetosella brevicaulis (Sond.) Kuntze
Acetosella hirta (L.) Kuntze
Acetosella macrostylis (Jacq.) Kuntze
Oxalis brevicaulis Sond.
Oxalis canescens Jacq.
Oxalis crassipes L.Bolus
Oxalis fortipes R.Knuth
Oxalis fulgida Lindl.
Oxalis hirsuta Steud.
Oxalis hirtella Jacq.
Oxalis longisepala Tod.
Oxalis macromischos Spreng.
Oxalis macrostylis Jacq.
Oxalis multiflora Jacq.
Oxalis reptatrix E.Mey. ex Sond.
Oxalis rosacea Jacq.
Oxalis rubella Jacq.
Oxalis rubella var. lilacina DC.
Oxalis secunda Jacq.
Oxalis sessilifolia L.
Oxalis tubiflora Jacq.

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.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.