Paspalum notatum (Bahia grass)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Paspalum notatum, photographed by Kevin Faccenda — fig. a Kevin Faccenda, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-03 / obs. 204064674

Paspalum notatum, photographed by Dragonette — fig. g Dragonette, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 171164349

Paspalum notatum, photographed by Jaime González — fig. h Jaime González, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 163146224

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 11 botanical countries

Native distribution of Paspalum notatum, 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
Bolivia	BOL
Brazil North	BZN
Brazil Northeast	BZE
Brazil South	BZS
Brazil Southeast	BZL
Brazil West-Central	BZC
Paraguay	PAR
Peru	PER
Uruguay	URU

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 134 in flower of 173 examined

85%

86%

88%

89%

72%

85%

84%

80%

58%

46%

89%

Proportion of examined Paspalum notatum in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	11	13	85%	58% to 96%
Feb	6	7	86%	49% to 97%
Mar	7	8	88%	53% to 98%
Apr	8	9	89%	56% to 98%
May	18	25	72%	52% to 86%
Jun	22	26	85%	66% to 94%
Jul	21	25	84%	65% to 94%
Aug	12	15	80%	55% to 93%
Sep	11	19	58%	36% to 77%
Oct	6	13	46%	23% to 71%
Nov	4	4	too few examined
Dec	8	9	89%	56% to 98%

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Paspalum notatum 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. 134 of 173 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. One month has fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for it. 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 2,046 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	1.6 °C	7.2 °C	15.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	26.4 °C	32.0 °C	34.8 °C
Annual rainfall	917 mm	1,302 mm	2,508 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	67 mm	236 mm	379 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 2,046 research-grade observations of Paspalum notatum 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 8 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.

Paspalum distachyon Willd. ex Döll
Paspalum notatum var. latiflorum Döll
Paspalum notatum var. notatum
Paspalum notatum var. typicum Parodi
Paspalum saltense Arechav.
Paspalum taphrophyllum Steud.
Paspalum tephophyllum Steud.
Paspalum uruguayense Arechav.

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.