Portulaca amilis (Paraguayan purslane)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Portulaca amilis, photographed by kcthetc1 — fig. a kcthetc1, CC0 1.0 / 2022-06-04 / obs. 203311967

Portulaca amilis, photographed by Neli Kanonerova — fig. b Neli Kanonerova, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 192242521

Portulaca amilis, photographed by Eduardo Luis Beltrocco — fig. c Eduardo Luis Beltrocco, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 189817018

Portulaca amilis, photographed by Sawyer Baran — fig. d Sawyer Baran, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 188932622

Portulaca amilis, photographed by Josiah Londerée — fig. e Josiah Londerée, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 163847643

Portulaca amilis, photographed by Mark Connolly — fig. f Mark Connolly, CC0 1.0 / obs. 151622763

Portulaca amilis, photographed by Raven Dandridge — fig. g Raven Dandridge, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 148213077

Portulaca amilis, photographed by Stan Shebs — fig. h Stan Shebs, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 159302306

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 10 botanical countries

Native distribution of Portulaca amilis, 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
Argentina Northeast	AGE	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Argentina Northwest	AGW
Bolivia	BOL
Brazil North	BZN
Brazil South	BZS
Brazil Southeast	BZL
Brazil West-Central	BZC
Paraguay	PAR
Peru	PER
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.

Flowering 610 in flower of 727 examined

73%

87%

78%

91%

88%

82%

81%

67%

56%

Proportion of examined Portulaca amilis in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	1	2	too few examined
Feb	3	4	too few examined
Mar	8	11	73%	43% to 90%
Apr	27	31	87%	71% to 95%
May	51	65	78%	67% to 87%
Jun	145	160	91%	85% to 94%
Jul	159	180	88%	83% to 92%
Aug	122	148	82%	76% to 88%
Sep	60	74	81%	71% to 88%
Oct	26	39	67%	51% to 79%
Nov	5	9	56%	27% to 81%
Dec	3	4	too few examined

Peak flowering in Jun. Each bar is the share of Portulaca amilis 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. 610 of 727 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 3 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. 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 2,003 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	0.9 °C	7.8 °C	16.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	29.1 °C	31.6 °C	33.2 °C
Annual rainfall	1,125 mm	1,325 mm	1,617 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	163 mm	226 mm	322 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 2,003 research-grade observations of Portulaca amilis 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 4 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.

Portulaca amilis var. amilis
Portulaca amilis var. rosengurttii D.Legrand
Portulaca pilgeri Poelln.
Portulaca pilosa var. paraguayensis Kuntze

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.