Pseudelephantopus spicatus(B.Juss. ex Aubl.) Rohr ex C.F.Baker

dog's-tongue

WFO wfo-0000050095 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Pseudelephantopus spicatus, photographed by ritirene
fig. a ritirene, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-08-01 / obs. 148186672
Pseudelephantopus spicatus, photographed by Jacy Chen
fig. b Jacy Chen, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 104606440
Pseudelephantopus spicatus, photographed by Arthur de Jesús Chavarría Pérez
fig. c Arthur de Jesús Chavarría Pérez, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 98775621
Pseudelephantopus spicatus, photographed by Ben Machado
fig. d Ben Machado, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 73482309
Pseudelephantopus spicatus, photographed by Alexis López Hernández
fig. e Alexis López Hernández, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 67686036
Pseudelephantopus spicatus, photographed by Alexis López Hernández
fig. f Alexis López Hernández, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 66827763
Pseudelephantopus spicatus, photographed by Alexis López Hernández
fig. g Alexis López Hernández, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 66827823
Pseudelephantopus spicatus, photographed by Andrés Ramírez-Barrera
fig. h Andrés Ramírez-Barrera, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 58944551

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.

Flowering 43 in flower of 46 examined

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Pseudelephantopus spicatus 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. 43 of 46 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 7 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 560 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 9.2 °C 15.1 °C 22.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 25.0 °C 30.1 °C 33.7 °C
Annual rainfall 894 mm 1,563 mm 3,611 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 15 mm 132 mm 440 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 560 research-grade observations of Pseudelephantopus spicatus 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 20 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.

  • Ageratum dubium Blanco
  • Ageratum quadriflorum Blanco
  • Distreptus nudiflorus Cass.
  • Distreptus replicatus Cass.
  • Distreptus spicatus (Juss. ex Aubl.) Cass.
  • Distreptus spicatus var. interrupta Ram.Goyena
  • Distreptus spicatus var. nicaraguensis Ram.Goyena
  • Elephantopus colimensis Sessé & Moc.
  • Elephantopus dubius Blanco
  • Elephantopus littoralis Sessé & Moc.
  • Elephantopus spicatus Juss. ex Aubl.
  • Elephantopus spicatus var. densiflorus Kuntze
  • Elephantopus spicatus var. flavidus Kuntze
  • Elephantopus spicatus var. laxiflorus Kuntze
  • Elephantopus spicatus var. lilacinus Kuntze
  • Elephantopus spicatus var. roseus Klatt
  • Elephantopus strigosus Willd. ex DC.
  • Matamoria spicata La Llave
  • Matamoria spicata (Juss. ex Aubl.) La Llave & Lex.
  • Pseudelephantopus spicatus (Juss. ex Aubl.) Rohr

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.

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. It has no native range either: Kew's checklist does not cover this taxon.