Strelitzia nicolai (Natal wild banana)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Strelitzia nicolai, photographed by Tony Rebelo — fig. a Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-05-23 / obs. 204674138

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 4 botanical countries

Native distribution of Strelitzia nicolai, 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
Botswana	BOT	AFRICA
KwaZulu-Natal	NAT
Mozambique	MOZ
Zimbabwe	ZIM

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 1,279 in flower of 2,272 examined

38%

19%

53%

48%

45%

67%

64%

74%

52%

64%

70%

63%

Proportion of examined Strelitzia nicolai in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	33	88	38%	28% to 48%
Feb	12	63	19%	11% to 30%
Mar	122	232	53%	46% to 59%
Apr	253	528	48%	44% to 52%
May	62	137	45%	37% to 54%
Jun	202	303	67%	61% to 72%
Jul	44	69	64%	52% to 74%
Aug	31	42	74%	59% to 85%
Sep	54	104	52%	42% to 61%
Oct	77	121	64%	55% to 72%
Nov	208	299	70%	64% to 75%
Dec	181	286	63%	58% to 69%

Peak flowering in Aug. Each bar is the share of Strelitzia nicolai 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. 1,279 of 2,272 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.

Also published as 2 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.

Strelitzia alba subsp. nicolai (Regel & Körn.) Maire & Weiller
Strelitzia quensonii Lem.

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.