Voyria caerulea

Plate 1 figs. a–f · 4 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 4 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Voyria caerulea, photographed by B. Phalan — fig. a B. Phalan, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-10-06 / obs. 178218618

Voyria caerulea, photographed by Guillaume Delaitre — fig. b Guillaume Delaitre, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 159100958

Voyria caerulea, photographed by Sidnei Dantas — fig. c Sidnei Dantas, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 51657327

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 7 botanical countries

Native distribution of Voyria caerulea, 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
Brazil North	BZN	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Brazil Northeast	BZE
Brazil West-Central	BZC
French Guiana	FRG
Guyana	GUY
Suriname	SUR
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.

Flowering 62 in flower of 62 examined

100%

Proportion of examined Voyria caerulea in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	2	2	too few examined
Feb	7	7	100%	65% to 100%
Mar	10	10	100%	72% to 100%
Apr	16	16	100%	81% to 100%
May	3	3	too few examined
Jun	5	5	100%	57% to 100%
Jul	5	5	100%	57% to 100%
Aug	3	3	too few examined
Sep	6	6	100%	61% to 100%
Oct	2	2	too few examined
Nov	1	1	too few examined
Dec	2	2	too few examined

Peak flowering in Feb. Each bar is the share of Voyria caerulea 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. 62 of 62 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 6 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.

Also published as 12 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.

Leiphaimos calycina (Splitg. ex C.DC.) Miq.
Leiphaimos spathacea (Lam.) Miq.
Leiphaimos spathaceus (Lam.) Miq.
Lita breviflora (Lam.) F.Dietr.
Lita caerulea Willd.
Lita caerulea (Aubl.) Forsyth f.
Lita coerulea Willd.
Lita spathacea (Lam.) F.Dietr.
Voyria breviflora Lam.
Voyria calycina Splitg. ex A.DC.
Voyria spathacea Lam.
Voyria spathacea Splitg.

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.
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.