Ziziphus mucronata (Buffalo thorn)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Ziziphus mucronata, photographed by Ricus Nel — fig. a Ricus Nel, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-11 / obs. 197070949

Ziziphus mucronata, photographed by Mark Liptrot — fig. b Mark Liptrot, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 194739974

Ziziphus mucronata, photographed by Dave Richardson — fig. c Dave Richardson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 190889627

Ziziphus mucronata, photographed by Andrew Hankey — fig. d Andrew Hankey, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 187654906

Ziziphus mucronata, photographed by Karen Eichholz — fig. e Karen Eichholz, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 187501902

Ziziphus mucronata, photographed by Margaret Burger — fig. f Margaret Burger, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 176775843

Ziziphus mucronata, photographed by Robert Taylor — fig. g Robert Taylor, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 173063136

Ziziphus mucronata, photographed by Manuel R Popp — fig. h Manuel R Popp, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 171943033

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 41 botanical countries

Native distribution of Ziziphus mucronata, 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
Angola	ANG	AFRICA
Benin	BEN
Botswana	BOT
Burkina	BKN
Burundi	BUR
Cameroon	CMN
Cape Provinces	CPP
Caprivi Strip	CPV
Central African Republic	CAF
Chad	CHA
Djibouti	DJI
DR Congo	ZAI
Eritrea	ERI
Eswatini	SWZ
Ethiopia	ETH
Free State	OFS
Gambia	GAM
Guinea	GUI
Ivory Coast	IVO
Kenya	KEN
KwaZulu-Natal	NAT
Madagascar	MDG
Malawi	MLW
Mali	MLI
Mauritania	MTN
Mozambique	MOZ
Namibia	NAM
Niger	NGR
Nigeria	NGA
Northern Provinces	TVL
Rwanda	RWA
Senegal	SEN
Somalia	SOM
Sudan-South Sudan	SUD
Tanzania	TAN
Togo	TOG
Uganda	UGA
Zambia	ZAM
Zimbabwe	ZIM
Saudi Arabia	SAU	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Yemen	YEM

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 80 in flower of 361 examined

48%

32%

38%

47%

53%

Proportion of examined Ziziphus mucronata in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	23	48	48%	34% to 62%
Feb	11	34	32%	19% to 49%
Mar	2	34	6%	2% to 19%
Apr	2	53	4%	1% to 13%
May	0	29	0%	0% to 12%
Jun	1	39	3%	0% to 13%
Jul	0	21	0%	0% to 15%
Aug	0	8	0%	0% to 32%
Sep	1	12	8%	1% to 35%
Oct	5	13	38%	18% to 64%
Nov	15	32	47%	31% to 64%
Dec	20	38	53%	37% to 68%

Peak flowering in Dec. Each bar is the share of Ziziphus mucronata 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. 80 of 361 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 2,010 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	2.6 °C	6.1 °C	15.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	25.1 °C	28.2 °C	34.2 °C
Annual rainfall	277 mm	665 mm	1,065 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	1 mm	19 mm	99 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 2,010 research-grade observations of Ziziphus mucronata 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 6 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.

Ziziphus adelensis Delile
Ziziphus baclei DC.
Ziziphus bubalina Licht. ex Roem. & Schult.
Ziziphus madecassa H.Perrier
Ziziphus mitis A.Rich.
Ziziphus mucronata subsp. mucronata

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.