Oxalis roseaJacq.

Annual Pink-sorrelsorrel

WFO wfo-0000386788 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Oxalis rosea, photographed by Bruno Avilez
fig. a Bruno Avilez, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-10-17 / obs. 173079972

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
01400295
Filed as
Oxalis rosea Jacq.
Det. by
D. E. Atha 2011-01-01
Collected
D. E. Atha 2011-05-03
Origin
US
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 2 botanical countries

Regions where Oxalis rosea is native: Chile Central, Chile South Chile CentralChile South
Native distribution of Oxalis rosea, 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
Chile Central CLC SOUTHERN AMERICA
Chile South CLS

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 110 in flower of 113 examined

Proportion of examined Oxalis rosea in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 10 10 100% 72% to 100%
Feb 5 5 100% 57% to 100%
Mar 1 1 too few examined
Apr 0 0 too few examined
May 1 1 too few examined
Jun 0 0 too few examined
Jul 0 0 too few examined
Aug 6 7 86% 49% to 97%
Sep 13 15 87% 62% to 96%
Oct 43 43 100% 92% to 100%
Nov 19 19 100% 83% to 100%
Dec 12 12 100% 76% to 100%

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Oxalis rosea 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. 110 of 113 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 5 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 302 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 1.0 °C 4.9 °C 9.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 17.2 °C 24.1 °C 28.9 °C
Annual rainfall 420 mm 697 mm 2,203 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 3 mm 9 mm 203 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 302 research-grade observations of Oxalis rosea 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 5 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 rosea (Jacq.) Kuntze
  • Oxalis rosea Sims
  • Oxalis rosea var. simplex Reiche
  • Oxalis simsii Sweet
  • Xanthoxalis rosea (Jacq.) Holub

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. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. 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.