Solanum aviculareG.Forst.

Kangaroo AppleNew Zealand nightshade

WFO wfo-0001026424 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Solanum aviculare, photographed by Greg Tasney
fig. a Greg Tasney, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-04-30 / obs. 192548581

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
00986613
Filed as
Solanum aviculare G.Forst.
Det. by
A. R. Bean 2006-02-01
Collected
L. A. Bohs 2006-02-05
Origin
AU
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 8 botanical countries

Regions where Solanum aviculare is native: Chatham Is., Kermadec Is., New South Wales, New Zealand North, New Zealand South, Norfolk Is., Queensland, Victoria New South WalesNew Zealand NorthNew Zealand SouthQueenslandVictoria Chatham Is.Kermadec Is.Norfolk Is.
Native distribution of Solanum aviculare, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Chatham Is. CTM AUSTRALASIA
Kermadec Is. KER
New South Wales NSW
New Zealand North NZN
New Zealand South NZS
Norfolk Is. NFK
Queensland QLD
Victoria VIC

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 295 in flower of 390 examined

Proportion of examined Solanum aviculare in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 52 63 83% 71% to 90%
Feb 28 40 70% 55% to 82%
Mar 27 42 64% 49% to 77%
Apr 10 27 37% 22% to 56%
May 4 18 22% 9% to 45%
Jun 1 10 10% 2% to 40%
Jul 1 7 14% 3% to 51%
Aug 4 5 80% 38% to 96%
Sep 22 25 88% 70% to 96%
Oct 35 35 100% 90% to 100%
Nov 50 51 98% 90% to 100%
Dec 61 67 91% 82% to 96%

Peak flowering in Oct. Each bar is the share of Solanum aviculare 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. 295 of 390 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 1,311 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 2.8 °C 6.2 °C 10.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 18.5 °C 24.3 °C 27.3 °C
Annual rainfall 722 mm 1,052 mm 1,903 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 122 mm 186 mm 375 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,311 research-grade observations of Solanum aviculare 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 8 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.

  • Solanum aviculare var. albiflorum Cheeseman
  • Solanum aviculare var. aviculare
  • Solanum aviculare var. latifolium G.T.S.Baylis
  • Solanum aviculare var. typicum Domin
  • Solanum baylisii Geras.
  • Solanum cheesemanii Geras.
  • Solanum dispar Loisel. ex Dunal
  • Solanum glaberrimum Dunal

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.
  4. 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.