Xanthosia pilosa

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Xanthosia pilosa, photographed by ronavery — fig. c ronavery, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 176998989

Xanthosia pilosa, photographed by Greg Tasney — fig. e Greg Tasney, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 171341021

Xanthosia pilosa, photographed by Gary Williams — fig. h Gary Williams, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 168356629

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 5 botanical countries

Native distribution of Xanthosia pilosa, 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
New South Wales	NSW	AUSTRALASIA
Queensland	QLD
South Australia	SOA
Tasmania	TAS
Victoria	VIC

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 1,044 in flower of 1,636 examined

48%

35%

28%

33%

31%

57%

61%

75%

90%

87%

73%

43%

Proportion of examined Xanthosia pilosa in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	31	65	48%	36% to 60%
Feb	24	68	35%	25% to 47%
Mar	20	71	28%	19% to 40%
Apr	45	135	33%	26% to 42%
May	41	132	31%	24% to 39%
Jun	91	161	57%	49% to 64%
Jul	65	106	61%	52% to 70%
Aug	128	170	75%	68% to 81%
Sep	231	256	90%	86% to 93%
Oct	257	295	87%	83% to 90%
Nov	85	117	73%	64% to 80%
Dec	26	60	43%	32% to 56%

Peak flowering in Sep. Each bar is the share of Xanthosia pilosa 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. 1,044 of 1,636 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 1,968 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	2.4 °C	7.9 °C	11.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	22.2 °C	25.0 °C	27.4 °C
Annual rainfall	834 mm	1,116 mm	1,419 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	146 mm	195 mm	232 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 1,968 research-grade observations of Xanthosia pilosa 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 11 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.

Leucolaena montana Benth.
Leucolaena pannosa Benth.
Xanthosia diffusa C.T.White
Xanthosia hirsuta DC.
Xanthosia montana Sieber ex DC.
Xanthosia pannosa (Benth.) Steud.
Xanthosia pilosa var. glabra C.Moore & Betche
Xanthosia pilosa var. longipes Domin
Xanthosia pilosa var. montana (DC.) Domin
Xanthosia pilosa var. pannosa (Benth.) Domin
Xanthosia vestita Benth.

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.