Pilea inaequalis (West Indian clearweed)

Plate 1 figs. a–g · 7 separate observations

Pilea inaequalis, photographed by Elliot Greiner — fig. a Elliot Greiner, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-03-04 / obs. 181587497

Pilea inaequalis, photographed by Joseph Hubbard — fig. f Joseph Hubbard, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 143449853

Pilea inaequalis, photographed by birdzilla — fig. g birdzilla, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 71635917

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: 00933734
Filed as: Pilea inaequalis (Juss. ex Poir.) Wedd.
Det. by: S. A. Mori 2007-08-10
Collected: S. A. Mori 2006-08-10
Origin: BQ
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 8 botanical countries

Native distribution of Pilea inaequalis, 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. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Dominican Republic	DOM	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Haiti	HAI
Jamaica	JAM
Leeward Is.	LEE
Puerto Rico	PUE
Trinidad-Tobago	TRT
Venezuela	VEN
Windward Is.	WIN

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 151 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	15.2 °C	19.2 °C	22.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	24.5 °C	26.3 °C	30.2 °C
Annual rainfall	1,462 mm	2,330 mm	3,166 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	180 mm	319 mm	516 mm

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 151 research-grade observations of Pilea inaequalis 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 21 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.

Adicea chamaedrys (Wedd.) Kuntze
Adicea guadalupensis (Wedd.) Kuntze
Adicea inaequalis (Juss. ex Poir.) Kuntze
Adicea obtusata (Liebm.) Kuntze
Adicea repens (Sw.) Kuntze
Dubrueilia inaequalis (Juss. ex Poir.) Gaudich.
Pilea chamaedrys Wedd.
Pilea guadalupensis Wedd.
Pilea hederacea (Savigny) Wedd.
Pilea montana Wedd.
Pilea obtusata Liebm.
Pilea pubescens var. montana (Wedd.) Wedd.
Pilea repens (Sw.) Liebm.
Pilea repens (Sw.) Wedd.
Pilea repens var. pusilla Wedd.
Pilea tenuicaulis Urb.
Urtica collina Bertero ex Spreng.
Urtica hederacea Savigny
Urtica inaequalis Juss. ex Poir.
Urtica obtusata Vahl ex Wedd.
Urtica repens Sw.

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.