Terminalia prunioidesM.A.Lawson

WFO wfo-0000408552 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Terminalia prunioides, photographed by Tony Rebelo
fig. a Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2021-06-10 / obs. 139791715

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.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Accession
K000413944
Filed as
Terminalia prunioides M.A.Lawson
Det. by
Wickens, G.E.
Collected
Holst, C. 1893-03-01
Origin
TZ
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 12 botanical countries

Regions where Terminalia prunioides is native: Angola, Botswana, Caprivi Strip, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Northern Provinces, Somalia, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe AngolaBotswanaCaprivi StripEthiopiaKenyaMozambiqueNamibiaNorthern ProvincesSomaliaTanzaniaZambiaZimbabwe
Native distribution of Terminalia prunioides, 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
Angola ANG AFRICA
Botswana BOT
Caprivi Strip CPV
Ethiopia ETH
Kenya KEN
Mozambique MOZ
Namibia NAM
Northern Provinces TVL
Somalia SOM
Tanzania TAN
Zambia ZAM
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 42 in flower of 130 examined

Proportion of examined Terminalia prunioides in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 9 17 53% 31% to 74%
Feb 6 13 46% 23% to 71%
Mar 0 11 0% 0% to 26%
Apr 0 9 0% 0% to 30%
May 1 9 11% 2% to 44%
Jun 0 15 0% 0% to 20%
Jul 0 6 0% 0% to 39%
Aug 0 6 0% 0% to 39%
Sep 2 7 29% 8% to 64%
Oct 4 10 40% 17% to 69%
Nov 12 15 80% 55% to 93%
Dec 8 12 67% 39% to 86%

Peak flowering in Nov. Each bar is the share of Terminalia prunioides 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. 42 of 130 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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 713 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 6.7 °C 10.4 °C 13.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 29.5 °C 31.8 °C 34.2 °C
Annual rainfall 212 mm 446 mm 657 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 1 mm 7 mm 25 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 713 research-grade observations of Terminalia prunioides 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 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.

  • Terminalia benguellensis Welw. ex Hiern
  • Terminalia benguellensis subsp. ovalis Welw. ex Hiern
  • Terminalia hararensis Engl.
  • Terminalia holstii Engl.
  • Terminalia petersii Engl.
  • Terminalia porphyrocarpa Schinz
  • Terminalia rautanenii Schinz
  • Terminalia somalensis Engl. & Diels

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. 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.