Tabernaemontana alba (white milkwood)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Tabernaemontana alba, photographed by Shawn O'Donnell — fig. a Shawn O'Donnell, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-28 / obs. 204377011

Tabernaemontana alba, photographed by Obed Palagot Echavarria — fig. b Obed Palagot Echavarria, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 125514279

Tabernaemontana alba, photographed by Juan Cruzado Cortés — fig. e Juan Cruzado Cortés, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 49617789

Tabernaemontana alba, photographed by Lily_Trujillo — fig. g Lily_Trujillo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 17592089

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 14 botanical countries

Native distribution of Tabernaemontana alba, 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
Belize	BLZ	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Colombia	CLM
Costa Rica	COS
Cuba	CUB
Guatemala	GUA
Honduras	HON
Nicaragua	NIC
Panamá	PAN
Southwest Caribbean	SWC
Mexico Central	MXC	NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Gulf	MXG
Mexico Northeast	MXE
Mexico Southeast	MXT
Mexico Southwest	MXS

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 260 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	12.5 °C	18.1 °C	21.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	27.6 °C	30.9 °C	34.5 °C
Annual rainfall	1,105 mm	1,642 mm	3,018 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	46 mm	135 mm	270 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 260 research-grade observations of Tabernaemontana alba 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 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.

Tabernaemontana amblyblasta S.F.Blake
Tabernaemontana amblyocarpa Urb.
Tabernaemontana berteroi var. parviflora A.DC.
Tabernaemontana martensii Peyr.
Tabernaemontana paisavelensis Loes.
Tabernaemontana tuxtlensis Sessé & Moc.
Tabernaemontana umbellata Sessé & Moc.
Tabernaemontana veracrucensis Sessé & Moc.

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.