Parkinsonia praecox

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Parkinsonia praecox, photographed by Hugo Hulsberg — fig. b Hugo Hulsberg, CC0 1.0 / obs. 183457835

Parkinsonia praecox, photographed by Valentín Alfano — fig. c Valentín Alfano, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 177930594

Parkinsonia praecox, photographed by Nicolas Olejnik — fig. d Nicolas Olejnik, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 176494558

Parkinsonia praecox, photographed by aacocucci — fig. e aacocucci, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 173101201

Parkinsonia praecox, photographed by mgentile — fig. f mgentile, CC0 1.0 / obs. 170426447

Parkinsonia praecox, photographed by Jose Luis Navarro — fig. g Jose Luis Navarro, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 165577659

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 17 botanical countries

Native distribution of Parkinsonia praecox, 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 Northeast	AGE	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Argentina Northwest	AGW
Argentina South	AGS
Bolivia	BOL
Brazil West-Central	BZC
Colombia	CLM
Ecuador	ECU
Guatemala	GUA
Paraguay	PAR
Peru	PER
Venezuela	VEN
Mexico Central	MXC	NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Gulf	MXG
Mexico Northeast	MXE
Mexico Northwest	MXN
Mexico Southeast	MXT
Mexico Southwest	MXS

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 141 in flower of 198 examined

58%

31%

92%

77%

69%

90%

78%

91%

56%

Proportion of examined Parkinsonia praecox in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	15	26	58%	39% to 74%
Feb	5	16	31%	14% to 56%
Mar	11	12	92%	65% to 99%
Apr	17	22	77%	57% to 90%
May	9	13	69%	42% to 87%
Jun	0	1	too few examined
Jul	1	4	too few examined
Aug	1	3	too few examined
Sep	9	10	90%	60% to 98%
Oct	21	27	78%	59% to 89%
Nov	42	46	91%	80% to 97%
Dec	10	18	56%	34% to 75%

Peak flowering in Mar. Each bar is the share of Parkinsonia praecox 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. 141 of 198 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 3 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 1,393 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	0.4 °C	8.5 °C	16.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	24.1 °C	31.0 °C	38.9 °C
Annual rainfall	148 mm	386 mm	929 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	2 mm	19 mm	62 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 1,393 research-grade observations of Parkinsonia praecox 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 9 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.

Caesalpinia brea Gillies ex Steud.
Caesalpinia praecox Ruiz & Pav.
Cercidium goldmanii Rose
Cercidium plurifoliolatum Micheli
Cercidium praecox (Ruiz & Pav.) Harms
Cercidium spinosum Tul.
Cercidium unijugum Rose
Cercidium viride (H.Karst.) H.Karst.
Rhetinophloeum viride H.Karst.

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.