Tabebuia aurea (Caribbean trumpet tree)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Tabebuia aurea, photographed by K. Musálem — fig. a K. Musálem, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-01-07 / obs. 175201405

Tabebuia aurea, photographed by Thomaz de Carvalho Callado — fig. b Thomaz de Carvalho Callado, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 164195482

Tabebuia aurea, photographed by Naturalist Tours — fig. c Naturalist Tours, CC0 1.0 / obs. 158210028

Tabebuia aurea, photographed by Ben Lewis — fig. d Ben Lewis, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 154319188

Tabebuia aurea, photographed by Tsssss — fig. e Tsssss, CC0 1.0 / obs. 95903031

Tabebuia aurea, photographed by Ben Machado — fig. g Ben Machado, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 55502118

Tabebuia aurea, photographed by Leonardo Bergamini — fig. h Leonardo Bergamini, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 64596319

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 10 botanical countries

Native distribution of Tabebuia aurea, 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
Argentina Northeast	AGE	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Argentina Northwest	AGW
Bolivia	BOL
Brazil North	BZN
Brazil Northeast	BZE
Brazil South	BZS
Brazil Southeast	BZL
Brazil West-Central	BZC
Paraguay	PAR
Peru	PER

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 99 in flower of 142 examined

67%

50%

52%

92%

76%

85%

62%

Proportion of examined Tabebuia aurea in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	3	too few examined
Feb	2	3	too few examined
Mar	6	9	67%	35% to 88%
Apr	3	6	50%	19% to 81%
May	1	3	too few examined
Jun	0	2	too few examined
Jul	11	21	52%	32% to 72%
Aug	35	38	92%	79% to 97%
Sep	16	21	76%	55% to 89%
Oct	17	20	85%	64% to 95%
Nov	8	13	62%	36% to 82%
Dec	0	3	too few examined

Peak flowering in Aug. Each bar is the share of Tabebuia aurea 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. 99 of 142 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 5 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 435 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	11.3 °C	19.7 °C	24.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	28.0 °C	30.8 °C	37.8 °C
Annual rainfall	632 mm	1,435 mm	2,526 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	12 mm	91 mm	354 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 435 research-grade observations of Tabebuia aurea 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 19 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.

Bignonia aurea Silva Manso
Bignonia squamellulosa DC.
Couralia caraiba (Mart.) Corr.Méllo ex Stellfeld
Gelseminum caraiba (Mart.) Kuntze
Handroanthus caraiba (Mart.) Mattos
Handroanthus leucophloeus (Mart. ex DC.) Mattos
Tabebuia argentea (Bureau & K.Schum.) Britton
Tabebuia caraiba (Mart.) Bureau
Tabebuia caraiba var. squamellulosa (A.DC.) Bur. & K.Schum.
Tabebuia suberosa Rusby
Tecoma argentea Bureau & K.Schum.
Tecoma aurea (Silva Manso) DC.
Tecoma caraiba Mart.
Tecoma caraiba var. grandiflora Hassl.
Tecoma caraiba var. squamellulosa Bureau & K.Schum.
Tecoma leucophlaeos Mart. ex DC.
Tecoma leucophloeos Mart. ex DC.
Tecoma squamellulosa DC.
Tecoma trichocalycina DC.

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.