Tragia urens (wavyleaf noseburn)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Tragia urens, photographed by natalie — fig. a natalie, CC0 1.0 / 2021-07-15 / obs. 143933687

Tragia urens, photographed by Douglas Goldman — fig. b Douglas Goldman, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 76840982

Tragia urens, photographed by Alison Northup — fig. c Alison Northup, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 76454873

Tragia urens, photographed by cwarneke — fig. d cwarneke, CC0 1.0 / obs. 23804562

Tragia urens, photographed by Brandon Corder — fig. f Brandon Corder, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 201003787

Tragia urens, photographed by John Kees — fig. g John Kees, CC0 1.0 / obs. 198493258

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: The New York Botanical Garden
Accession: 01095346
Filed as: Tragia urens L.
Det. by: S. A. Mori 2010-05-27
Collected: S. A. Mori 2010-05-25
Origin: US
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 9 botanical countries

Native distribution of Tragia urens, 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
Alabama	ALA	NORTHERN AMERICA
Florida	FLA
Georgia	GEO
Louisiana	LOU
Mississippi	MSI
North Carolina	NCA
South Carolina	SCA
Texas	TEX
Virginia	VRG

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 366 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	1.5 °C	8.6 °C	16.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	30.3 °C	31.8 °C	33.1 °C
Annual rainfall	1,214 mm	1,350 mm	1,589 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	151 mm	202 mm	309 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 366 research-grade observations of Tragia urens 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 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.

Allosandra lanceolata Raf.
Leptobotrys discolor Baill.
Tragia discolor Müll.Arg.
Tragia discolor f. lanceolata (Michx.) Müll.Arg.
Tragia discolor f. latifolia Müll.Arg.
Tragia discolor var. cuneata Müll.Arg.
Tragia discolor var. linearis (Michx.) Müll.Arg.
Tragia discolor var. subovalis (Michx.) Müll.Arg.
Tragia innocua Walter
Tragia linearifolia Elliott
Tragia urens var. innocua Pax & K.Hoffm.
Tragia urens var. lanceolata Michx.
Tragia urens var. linearis Michx.
Tragia urens var. subovalis Michx.

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.