Senna ligustrina (privet senna)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Senna ligustrina, photographed by Zac Peterson — fig. a Zac Peterson, CC BY 4.0 / 2020-09-22 / obs. 99149147

Senna ligustrina, photographed by Alison Northup — fig. b Alison Northup, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 30198917

Senna ligustrina, photographed by marique — fig. c marique, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 26245222

Senna ligustrina, photographed by Stan Shebs — fig. d Stan Shebs, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 167925934

Senna ligustrina, photographed by Leila Dasher — fig. e Leila Dasher, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 196923037

Senna ligustrina, photographed by Jade Fortnash — fig. f Jade Fortnash, CC0 1.0 / obs. 179965514

Senna ligustrina, photographed by Laurie Brooks — fig. h Laurie Brooks, CC0 1.0 / obs. 133860559

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.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium: The New York Botanical Garden
Accession: 01454104
Filed as: Senna ligustrina (L.) H.S.Irwin & Barneby
Det. by: A. R. Franck 2024-08-02
Collected: A. H. Curtiss 1895-09-13
Origin: US
The sheet: View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 10 botanical countries

Native distribution of Senna ligustrina, 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
Bahamas	BAH	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Cayman Is.	CAY
Cuba	CUB
Dominican Republic	DOM
Haiti	HAI
Jamaica	JAM
Leeward Is.	LEE
Panamá	PAN
Windward Is.	WIN
Florida	FLA	NORTHERN AMERICA

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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 258 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	10.9 °C	15.0 °C	18.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	29.2 °C	30.8 °C	32.0 °C
Annual rainfall	1,294 mm	1,459 mm	1,614 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	126 mm	162 mm	205 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 258 research-grade observations of Senna ligustrina 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.

Also published as 16 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.

Cassia angustisiliqua Torr. & A.Gray
Cassia bahamensis Mill.
Cassia ligustrina L.
Cassia ligustrina var. eggersiana Urb.
Cassia ligustrina var. jaegeriana Urb.
Cassia turquinae (Britton) León
Cassia turquinae (Britton & Rose) Leon
Ditremexa confusa Britton
Ditremexa confusa Britton & Rose
Ditremexa ligustrina (L.) Jackson
Ditremexa ligustrina (L.) Britton & Rose
Ditremexa ligustrina (L.) Jacks.
Peiranisia bahamensis (Mill.) Britton & Rose
Peiranisia turquinae Britton
Peiranisia turquinae Britton & Rose
Senna ligustrina var. turquinae (Britton) A.Barreto & Yakovlev

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.