The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Tibouchina
Also called Glory Bushes And Allies
Tibouchina is a neotropical flowering plant genus in the family Melastomataceae. Species of this genus are subshrubs, shrubs or small trees and typically have purple flowers. They are native to Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America where they are found as far south as northern Argentina. Members of this genus are known as glory bushes, glory trees or princess flowers. The name Tibouchina is adapted from a Guianan indigenous name for a member of this genus. A systematic study in 2013 showed that as then circumscribed the genus was paraphyletic, and in 2019 the genus was split into a more narrowly circumscribed Tibouchina, two re-established genera Pleroma and Chaetogastra, and a new genus, Andesanthus.
All the species of Tibouchina are native to the Americas as far north as Mexico south to northern Argentina, with many found in Brazil, and others in Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, French Guiana, Guyana, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela. Members of Tibouchina tend to be found in lowland savannas and on the lower slopes of the Andes. All Tibouchina species as well as those formerly placed in the genus are considered noxious weeds in Hawaii, because of their high potential for being invasive species. Many species, such as T. araguaiensis, T. papyrus, T. mathaei and T. nigricans, have narrow distributions, being known from only a handful of locations, while a few other species, including T. aspera, T. barbigera and T. bipenicillata, have broader distributions.
Tibouchina albescens · Tibouchina araguaiensis · Tibouchina aspera · Tibouchina bruniana · Tibouchina catharinae · Tibouchina dissitiflora · Tibouchina duidae · Tibouchina edmundoi · Tibouchina fraterna · Tibouchina johnwurdackiana · Tibouchina karstenii · Tibouchina llanorum
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Tibouchina by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts are shared under the same licence.
