Priva lappulacea (cat's tongue)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Priva lappulacea, photographed by Dan Schofield — fig. a Dan Schofield, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-03-29 / obs. 185355135

Priva lappulacea, photographed by Brian Oakes Haiti Hunter — fig. b Brian Oakes Haiti Hunter, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 181974494

Priva lappulacea, photographed by Rodolfo Salinas Villarreal — fig. c Rodolfo Salinas Villarreal, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 158856139

Priva lappulacea, photographed by Cenoteando — fig. d Cenoteando, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 139338912

Priva lappulacea, photographed by Helio Lourencini — fig. e Helio Lourencini, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 138032872

Priva lappulacea, photographed by Tereso Hernández Morales — fig. h Tereso Hernández Morales, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 114643567

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 41 botanical countries

Native distribution of Priva lappulacea, 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
Aruba	ARU	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Bahamas	BAH
Belize	BLZ
Bolivia	BOL
Brazil North	BZN
Brazil West-Central	BZC
Cayman Is.	CAY
Colombia	CLM
Costa Rica	COS
Cuba	CUB
Dominican Republic	DOM
Ecuador	ECU
El Salvador	ELS
French Guiana	FRG
Guatemala	GUA
Guyana	GUY
Haiti	HAI
Honduras	HON
Jamaica	JAM
Leeward Is.	LEE
Netherlands Antilles	NLA
Nicaragua	NIC
Panamá	PAN
Paraguay	PAR
Peru	PER
Puerto Rico	PUE
Southwest Caribbean	SWC
Suriname	SUR
Trinidad-Tobago	TRT
Turks-Caicos Is.	TCI
Venezuela	VEN
Venezuelan Antilles	VNA
Windward Is.	WIN
Florida	FLA	NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Central	MXC
Mexico Gulf	MXG
Mexico Northeast	MXE
Mexico Northwest	MXN
Mexico Southeast	MXT
Mexico Southwest	MXS
Texas	TEX

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 185 in flower of 215 examined

64%

90%

63%

83%

100%

96%

81%

90%

93%

95%

93%

79%

Proportion of examined Priva lappulacea in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	14	22	64%	43% to 80%
Feb	9	10	90%	60% to 98%
Mar	5	8	63%	31% to 86%
Apr	20	24	83%	64% to 93%
May	15	15	100%	80% to 100%
Jun	23	24	96%	80% to 99%
Jul	21	26	81%	62% to 91%
Aug	9	10	90%	60% to 98%
Sep	25	27	93%	77% to 98%
Oct	19	20	95%	76% to 99%
Nov	14	15	93%	70% to 99%
Dec	11	14	79%	52% to 92%

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Priva lappulacea 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. 185 of 215 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 1,687 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	11.1 °C	19.1 °C	24.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	27.9 °C	30.8 °C	35.7 °C
Annual rainfall	630 mm	1,224 mm	2,364 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	8 mm	73 mm	254 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 1,687 research-grade observations of Priva lappulacea 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 10 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.

Blairia lappulacea Steud.
Busseria lappulacea (L.) Cramer
Duranta parviflora Turcz.
Priva echinata Juss.
Priva lamiifolia M.Martens & Galeotti
Priva lappulacea f. albiflora Moldenke
Priva lappulacea f. lappulacea
Tamonea lappulacea (L.) Poir.
Verbena lappulacea L.
Zappania lappulacea (L.) Lam.

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.