Plantago arborescens

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 7 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 7 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Plantago arborescens, photographed by Christian Berg — fig. a Christian Berg, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-01-01 / obs. 174722637

Plantago arborescens, photographed by Daniel Cahen — fig. b Daniel Cahen, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 14397607

Plantago arborescens, photographed by Vítor Jorge — fig. g Vítor Jorge, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 171507586

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: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Accession: K000243849
Filed as: Plantago arborescens (Mirb.) Poir.
Det. by: Clarke, C. B.
Collected: Manden, G. 1865-01-01
Origin: not recorded
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 2 botanical countries

Native distribution of Plantago arborescens, 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
Canary Is.	CNY	AFRICA
Madeira	MDR

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 254 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	6.7 °C	14.2 °C	15.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	22.1 °C	22.9 °C	24.0 °C
Annual rainfall	400 mm	481 mm	2,520 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	4 mm	20 mm	121 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 254 research-grade observations of Plantago arborescens 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 12 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.

Plantago arborescens var. canescens Svent.
Plantago arborescens var. compacta Barnéoud
Plantago arborescens var. maderensis (Decne.) Pilg.
Plantago arborescens var. mascaensis Svent.
Plantago arborescens var. palmensis Pit.
Plantago costae Menezes
Plantago maderensis Decne.
Psyllium arborescens Mirb.
Psyllium arborescens subsp. maderensis (Decne.) G.Kunkel
Psyllium arborescens var. canescens (Svent.) G.Kunkel
Psyllium arborescens var. mascaensis (Svent.) G.Kunkel
Psyllium maderense (Decne.) H.Dietr.

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.
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.