Peperomia obtusifolia(L.) A.Dietr.

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.

Herbarium

The New York Botanical Garden

Accession

222545

Filed as

Peperomia obtusifolia (L.) A.Dietr.

Det. by

G. Mathieu 2005-01-01

Collected

Y. E. J. Mexia 1938-03-15

Origin

MX

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. 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.

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.

It is not found anywhere that gets close to freezing. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 255 research-grade observations of Peperomia obtusifolia 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 Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.

Selections of Peperomia obtusifolia that somebody named and propagated. A cultivar is not a botanical taxon: it is governed by the cultivated-plant code rather than the botanical one, so it appears in no taxonomic backbone, and it has no native range and no wild population of its own. These get no page here, because a cultivar has no photographs, no range and no flowering data of its own, and a page with none of those is not a page.

• ‘ʽGolden Gate’’ Q110767188
• ‘ʽGreengold’’ Q110767189
• ‘ʽVariegata’’ Q110767190

From Wikidata (CC0), joined to this species on its World Flora Online identifier, so the link to the parent is exact rather than a name match. This list is what is recorded in an openly licensed register; it is not every cultivar that exists, and for many genera it is not close. Why, and how far short it falls.

How Peperomia obtusifolia grows, merged from four structured plant databases and a set of traits read from public-domain field guides. This is a record of documented characteristics, not care advice; each value keeps the source that reported it, and a value read from prose is tagged extracted so it is never mistaken for a measured fact.

USDA PLANTS, GIFT, Wikidata, EOL TraitBank (via Zenodo) and traits mined from USDA NRCS plant guides. per source (public domain, CC BY 4.0, CC0). Synced 2026-07-19. Merged per species: USDA PLANTS (public domain) and GIFT (CC BY 4.0) for structured growth traits, Wikidata (CC0) for fruit type and height, and EOL TraitBank via Zenodo (per record CC0 or CC BY). A fifth set is mined from public-domain USDA NRCS plant guides, each value carrying its verbatim quote. Values tagged extracted were read from prose, never a structured record; where sources disagree, every value is kept with its own source.

Kew records Peperomia obtusifolia as a useful plant in these 2 categories. This is a record that the species is used, drawn from a checklist of economically useful plants. It is not a recommendation, a dose, or a safety claim, and where a category reads Medicines or Poisons that is a use somebody documented, not advice from us.

• Medicines
• Environmental Uses

Kew World Checklist of Useful Plant Species. CC-BY 4.0. Synced 2026-07-18.

Species recorded interacting with Peperomia obtusifolia in the wild, grouped by the kind of interaction. These are observations aggregated from many studies; the partners shown are the most frequently recorded for each type, and this is a record of what was observed, not a complete list.

Global Biotic Interactions (GloBI). CC-BY 4.0 (aggregate) / per-source. Synced 2026-07-18. Aggregated across many source datasets by GloBI; at this aggregation level provenance is asserted for GloBI as a whole, not per partner. Joined on the accepted binomial and capped at the eight most frequently recorded partners per interaction type.

What Peperomia obtusifolia is called elsewhere, grouped by language. Recorded verbatim from open sources; where a language has more than one common name, both are shown.

English

baby rubberplant, American rubberplant

Chinese

圆叶椒草, 圓葉椒草

German

fleischige Peperomie

Swedish

fredsgrönska

Wikidata (P1843, CC0) + GBIF vernacular names. CC0 / per-source. Synced 2026-07-18. Wikidata is preferred where both sources give a name; GBIF supplements it. Joined on the World Flora Online identifier (Wikidata) or an exact GBIF species match.

Peperomia obtusifolia was named by (L.) A.Dietr., first published in Sp. Pl., ed. 6. i. 154, partim. This is the nomenclatural record, who published the name and where, not a description of the plant.

Author

(L.) A.Dietr.

Published in

Sp. Pl., ed. 6. i. 154, partim

IPNI

679269-1

IPNI (International Plant Names Index). CC-BY 4.0. Synced 2026-07-18. The protologue citation and IPNI record, joined to this species on its World Flora Online identifier where IPNI carries one, else on the exact binomial with authorship.

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.

• Peperomia alveolata Trel.
• Peperomia antoni var. reducta Trel.
• Peperomia bayatana Trel.
• Peperomia cangrejalana Trel.
• Peperomia cruciata Trel.
• Peperomia cuneata Miq.
• Peperomia cuneifolia (Jacq.) A.Dietr.
• Peperomia daiquiriana Trel.
• Peperomia dodecatheontophylla Trel.
• Peperomia earlei Trel.
• Peperomia fieldiana Trel.
• Peperomia floridana Small
• Peperomia formonensis Trel.
• Peperomia galeottii Miq.
• Peperomia hemionitidifolia Ham.
• Peperomia lancetillana Trel.
• Peperomia lunana Trel.
• Peperomia macropoda Miq.
• Peperomia magnoliifolia var. emarginulata C.DC.
• Peperomia mentiens Trel.
• Peperomia obtusifolia f. oblongifolia Miq.
• Peperomia obtusifolia var. cuneata (Miq.) Griseb.
• Peperomia obtusifolia var. emarginulata (C.DC.) C.DC.
• Peperomia obtusifolia var. floridana (Small) D.B.Ward

and 23 more.

1. 01 World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
2. 02 iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
3. 03 Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
4. 04 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.