Ruellia tuberosa (minnieroot)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Ruellia tuberosa, photographed by Sarka Masova — fig. a Sarka Masova, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-21 / obs. 199404946

Ruellia tuberosa, photographed by Ong Jyh Seng — fig. b Ong Jyh Seng, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 199011430

Ruellia tuberosa, photographed by Rongrong Angkaew — fig. c Rongrong Angkaew, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 192081081

Ruellia tuberosa, photographed by ritirene — fig. f ritirene, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 176379196

Ruellia tuberosa, photographed by Muhammad Malik Ali — fig. g Muhammad Malik Ali, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 173045205

Ruellia tuberosa, photographed by Jean-Paul Boerekamps — fig. h Jean-Paul Boerekamps, CC0 1.0 / obs. 173005868

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 28 botanical countries

Native distribution of Ruellia tuberosa, 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
Cayman Is.	CAY
Colombia	CLM
Cuba	CUB
Dominican Republic	DOM
French Guiana	FRG
Guatemala	GUA
Guyana	GUY
Haiti	HAI
Honduras	HON
Jamaica	JAM
Leeward Is.	LEE
Netherlands Antilles	NLA
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
Mexico Gulf	MXG	NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Northeast	MXE
Mexico Northwest	MXN
Mexico Southeast	MXT
Mexico Southwest	MXS

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 197 in flower of 235 examined

93%

100%

72%

92%

89%

79%

84%

82%

73%

95%

80%

63%

Proportion of examined Ruellia tuberosa in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	14	15	93%	70% to 99%
Feb	7	7	100%	65% to 100%
Mar	13	18	72%	49% to 88%
Apr	44	48	92%	80% to 97%
May	16	18	89%	67% to 97%
Jun	15	19	79%	57% to 91%
Jul	16	19	84%	62% to 94%
Aug	18	22	82%	61% to 93%
Sep	8	11	73%	43% to 90%
Oct	18	19	95%	75% to 99%
Nov	16	20	80%	58% to 92%
Dec	12	19	63%	41% to 81%

Peak flowering in Feb. Each bar is the share of Ruellia tuberosa 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. 197 of 235 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 2,001 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	13.1 °C	21.9 °C	24.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	28.0 °C	30.8 °C	36.8 °C
Annual rainfall	761 mm	1,791 mm	3,049 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	17 mm	92 mm	513 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 2,001 research-grade observations of Ruellia tuberosa 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 7 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.

Cryphiacanthus barbadensis Nees
Dipteracanthus clandestinus (L.) C.Presl
Ruellia clandestina L.
Ruellia lysimachia Nees
Ruellia paniculata Scop. ex Nees
Ruellia picta G.Lodd.
Ruellia tuberosa var. humilis M.Gómez

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.