Pseuderanthemum variabile (Love flower)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Pseuderanthemum variabile, photographed by Greg Tasney — fig. a Greg Tasney, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-05-31 / obs. 202374399

Pseuderanthemum variabile, photographed by Hugo Innes — fig. b Hugo Innes, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 200944695

Pseuderanthemum variabile, photographed by Steve Fitzgerald — fig. h Steve Fitzgerald, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 191461831

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 3 botanical countries

Native distribution of Pseuderanthemum variabile, 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
New South Wales	NSW	AUSTRALASIA
Queensland	QLD
New Caledonia	NWC	PACIFIC

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 1,471 in flower of 1,581 examined

97%

96%

92%

90%

87%

51%

63%

82%

73%

89%

97%

Proportion of examined Pseuderanthemum variabile in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	348	360	97%	94% to 98%
Feb	250	260	96%	93% to 98%
Mar	243	252	96%	93% to 98%
Apr	158	172	92%	87% to 95%
May	62	69	90%	81% to 95%
Jun	26	30	87%	70% to 95%
Jul	19	37	51%	36% to 67%
Aug	12	19	63%	41% to 81%
Sep	27	33	82%	66% to 91%
Oct	19	26	73%	54% to 86%
Nov	66	74	89%	80% to 94%
Dec	241	249	97%	94% to 98%

Peak flowering in Dec. Each bar is the share of Pseuderanthemum variabile 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. 1,471 of 1,581 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 2,003 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	5.9 °C	9.8 °C	17.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	23.9 °C	27.1 °C	30.1 °C
Annual rainfall	851 mm	1,170 mm	2,490 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	92 mm	160 mm	237 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 2,003 research-grade observations of Pseuderanthemum variabile 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 18 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.

Chrestienia elegans Montrouz.
Chrestienia montana Montrouz.
Eranthemum micranthum Nees
Eranthemum pratense Pancher ex Beauvis.
Eranthemum variabile R.Br.
Eranthemum variabile var. dentatum Nees
Eranthemum variabile var. integrifolium Nees
Eranthemum variabile var. lineare Nees
Eranthemum variabile var. molle Benth.
Pseuderanthemum grandiflorum f. glabrescens Domin
Pseuderanthemum grandiflorum f. subrosulatum Domin
Pseuderanthemum grandiflorum var. longiflorum Domin
Pseuderanthemum grandiflorum var. molle (Benth.) Domin
Pseuderanthemum grandiflorum var. perglandulosum Domin
Pseuderanthemum grandiflorum var. pluriflorum Domin
Pseuderanthemum microcarpum Domin
Pseuderanthemum ultralineare Domin
Siphoneranthemum variabile (R.Br.) 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.