Rhaphithamnus spinosus

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Rhaphithamnus spinosus, photographed by Cesar Ormazabal — fig. b Cesar Ormazabal, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 190479330

Rhaphithamnus spinosus, photographed by Leonel Roget — fig. g Leonel Roget, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 175674992

Rhaphithamnus spinosus, photographed by Inao Vasquez — fig. h Inao Vasquez, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 139919615

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 Rhaphithamnus spinosus, 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 South	AGS	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Chile Central	CLC
Chile South	CLS

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 49 in flower of 153 examined

14%

15%

54%

87%

91%

14%

Proportion of examined Rhaphithamnus spinosus in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	1	7	14%	3% to 51%
Feb	3	20	15%	5% to 36%
Mar	0	16	0%	0% to 19%
Apr	0	17	0%	0% to 18%
May	0	11	0%	0% to 26%
Jun	0	9	0%	0% to 30%
Jul	0	8	0%	0% to 32%
Aug	0	3	too few examined
Sep	7	13	54%	29% to 77%
Oct	27	31	87%	71% to 95%
Nov	10	11	91%	62% to 98%
Dec	1	7	14%	3% to 51%

Peak flowering in Nov. Each bar is the share of Rhaphithamnus spinosus 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. 49 of 153 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. One month has fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for it. 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 839 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-0.4 °C	4.0 °C	7.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	16.2 °C	20.6 °C	25.4 °C
Annual rainfall	674 mm	1,907 mm	4,005 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	5 mm	215 mm	534 mm

It is found where winters bring light frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 839 research-grade observations of Rhaphithamnus spinosus 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 23 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.

Citharexylum cyanocarpum Gay
Citharexylum cyanocarpum Hook. & Arn.
Citharexylum ovatum Turcz.
Citharexylum psilacanthum Turcz.
Citharexylum verticillatum Klotzsch ex Walp.
Duranta umbilicata Miers
Poeppigia cyanea Bert. ex Moldenke
Poeppigia cyanocarpa Bertero ex Hook. & Arn.
Rhaphithamnus amoenus Miers
Rhaphithamnus buxifolius Miers
Rhaphithamnus cyanocarpum (Hook. & Arn.) Miers
Rhaphithamnus cyanocarpus var. moorei Espinosa
Rhaphithamnus cyanocarpus var. pallidus Miers
Rhaphithamnus macracanthus Gand.
Rhaphithamnus myrtifolius Miers ex Moldenke
Rhaphithamnus pallidus Miers ex Moldenke
Rhaphithamnus parvifolius Miers
Rhaphithamnus rotundifolius Miers ex Moldenke
Rhaphithamnus spinosus f. albiflorus G.Kunkel
Rhaphithamnus spinosus f. microphyllus G.Kunkel
Rhaphithamnus spinosus var. inermis G.Kunkel
Volkameria spinosa Juss.
Volkameria verticillata Ruiz & Pav. ex Walp.

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.