Syncarpia glomulifera(Sm.) Nied.

turpentine tree

WFO wfo-0000318000 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Syncarpia glomulifera, photographed by Greg Tasney
fig. a Greg Tasney, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-04-16 / obs. 188496377

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 2 botanical countries

Regions where Syncarpia glomulifera is native: New South Wales, Queensland New South WalesQueensland
Native distribution of Syncarpia glomulifera, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
New South Wales NSW AUSTRALASIA
Queensland QLD

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 40 in flower of 126 examined

Proportion of examined Syncarpia glomulifera in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 7 0% 0% to 35%
Feb 0 9 0% 0% to 30%
Mar 0 4 too few examined
Apr 0 5 0% 0% to 43%
May 0 7 0% 0% to 35%
Jun 0 7 0% 0% to 35%
Jul 0 8 0% 0% to 32%
Aug 0 13 0% 0% to 23%
Sep 16 29 55% 38% to 72%
Oct 22 26 85% 66% to 94%
Nov 2 7 29% 8% to 64%
Dec 0 4 too few examined

Peak flowering in Oct. Each bar is the share of Syncarpia glomulifera 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. 40 of 126 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 2 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. 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 1,125 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 4.8 °C 8.4 °C 12.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 23.6 °C 25.8 °C 28.2 °C
Annual rainfall 878 mm 1,138 mm 1,656 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 127 mm 193 mm 233 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,125 research-grade observations of Syncarpia glomulifera 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 14 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.

  • Kamptzia albens (A.Cunn. ex DC.) Nees
  • Kamptzia albens (DC.) Nees
  • Metrosideros glomeruliflora A.Gray
  • Metrosideros glomulifera Sm.
  • Metrosideros glomulifera var. glabra (Benth.) C.Moore
  • Metrosideros glomulifera var. glomulifera
  • Metrosideros procera Salisb.
  • Metrosideros propinqua Salisb.
  • Nania glomulifera (Sm.) Kuntze
  • Syncarpia laurifolia Graeffer ex Ten.
  • Syncarpia laurifolia var. glabra Benth.
  • Syncarpia procera (K.D.Koenig & Sims) Domin
  • Syncarpia procera var. glabra (Benth.) Domin
  • Tristania albens A.Cunn. ex DC.

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.