Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations
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 8 botanical countries
| Region | TDWG code | Continent |
|---|---|---|
| Bolivia | BOL | SOUTHERN AMERICA |
| Chile Central | CLC | |
| Chile North | CLN | |
| Colombia | CLM | |
| Cuba | CUB | |
| Ecuador | ECU | |
| Peru | PER | |
| Venezuela | VEN |
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 521 observations
| Condition | 5th percentile | Median | 95th percentile |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coldest month, mean daily low | 3.5 °C | 10.1 °C | 15.0 °C |
| Warmest month, mean daily high | 17.1 °C | 20.4 °C | 28.4 °C |
| Annual rainfall | 51 mm | 911 mm | 1,529 mm |
| Rainfall in the driest quarter | 4 mm | 72 mm | 156 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 521 research-grade observations of Tara spinosa 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 Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.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 16 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.
- Caesalpinia horrida (Kunth) Spreng.
- Caesalpinia mucronata Willd.
- Caesalpinia pectinata Cav.
- Caesalpinia spinosa (Molina) Kuntze
- Caesalpinia tara Ruiz & Pav.
- Caesalpinia tinctoria Benth. ex Taub.
- Caesalpinia tinctoria (Molina) Dombey ex DC.
- Caesalpinia tinctoria var. horrida Pittier
- Coulteria chilensis DC.
- Coulteria horrida Kunth
- Coulteria tinctoria (Molina) Kunth
- Poinciana mucronata (Willd.) Poir.
- Poinciana spinosa Molina
- Poinciana tara Ruiz & Pav. ex DC.
- Tara tinctoria Molina
- Tara tinctoria var. horrida (Kunth) Pittier
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.
- USDA PLANTS Database. common name, checklist symbol CASP11. public domain. 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.