Paspalum quadrifariumLam.

tussock paspalum

WFO wfo-0000888315 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Paspalum quadrifarium, photographed by Matias Cabezas
fig. a Matias Cabezas, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-11-18 / obs. 169381685

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
763129
Filed as
Paspalum quadrifarium Lam.
Det. by
J. C. Lindeman
Collected
J. C. Lindeman 1966-01-21
Origin
BR
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 5 botanical countries

Regions where Paspalum quadrifarium is native: Argentina Northeast, Argentina Northwest, Brazil South, Paraguay, Uruguay Argentina NortheastArgentina NorthwestBrazil SouthParaguayUruguay
Native distribution of Paspalum quadrifarium, 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
Argentina Northeast AGE SOUTHERN AMERICA
Argentina Northwest AGW
Brazil South BZS
Paraguay PAR
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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 122 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 3.6 °C 6.8 °C 8.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 23.4 °C 27.7 °C 29.3 °C
Annual rainfall 302 mm 1,015 mm 1,290 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 4 mm 153 mm 260 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 122 research-grade observations of Paspalum quadrifarium 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 7 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.

  • Panicum lagascae var. quadrifarium (Lam.) Kuntze
  • Paspalum eruciferum Trin. ex Steud.
  • Paspalum ferrugineum Trin.
  • Paspalum quadrifarium var. ferrugineum (Trin.) Herter
  • Paspalum quadrifarium var. majus Döll
  • Paspalum quadrifarium var. minus Döll
  • Paspalum variegatum Link

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.