Peumus boldus (boldo)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Peumus boldus, photographed by Nicolás Lavandero — fig. a Nicolás Lavandero, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-01-13 / obs. 179209054

Peumus boldus, photographed by Cesar Ormazabal — fig. c Cesar Ormazabal, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 172508436

Peumus boldus, photographed by Alfonso Benítez-Mora — fig. e Alfonso Benítez-Mora, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 163442467

Peumus boldus, photographed by Bruno Avilez — fig. f Bruno Avilez, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 171682917

Peumus boldus, photographed by Cecilia Briceño — fig. h Cecilia Briceño, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 165184342

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 2 botanical countries

Native distribution of Peumus boldus, 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
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 288 in flower of 1,168 examined

42%

66%

61%

35%

Proportion of examined Peumus boldus in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	1	76	1%	0% to 7%
Feb	1	97	1%	0% to 6%
Mar	1	58	2%	0% to 9%
Apr	1	49	2%	0% to 11%
May	5	75	7%	3% to 15%
Jun	42	101	42%	32% to 51%
Jul	107	161	66%	59% to 73%
Aug	73	119	61%	52% to 70%
Sep	43	122	35%	27% to 44%
Oct	10	132	8%	4% to 13%
Nov	3	102	3%	1% to 8%
Dec	1	76	1%	0% to 7%

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Peumus boldus 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. 288 of 1,168 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 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 1,531 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	2.4 °C	5.6 °C	9.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	18.6 °C	23.7 °C	29.0 °C
Annual rainfall	473 mm	959 mm	2,359 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	3 mm	26 mm	170 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 1,531 research-grade observations of Peumus boldus 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 11 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.

Boldea boldus (Molina) Looser
Boldea fragrans (Ruiz & Pav.) Endl.
Boldu boldus (Molina) A.Lyons
Boldu chilanum Nees
Boldu chilensis Schult. & Schult.f.
Boldus boldus (Molina) Lyons
Boldus chilensis Schult. & Schult.f.
Laurus belloto Miers ex Nees
Laurus lingui Bridges ex Nees
Peumus fragrans (Ruiz & Pav.) Pers.
Ruizia fragrans Ruiz & Pav.

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.