Madagascar Rubbervine Cryptostegia madagascariensis
Madagascar Rubbervine is an introduced perennial vine, found in the lower 48 states and Puerto Rico.
More about this plant
Cryptostegia madagascariensis is a species of flowering plant in the family Apocynaceae. It is commonly known as purple rubber vine, is a woody-perennial vine that is native to western and northern Madagascar. It has also been introduced to several tropical and subtropical regions by man, including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. It is very similar to the rubber vine, which is also native to Madagascar. In their area of overlap some hybrids have been observed, which are distinguishable by intermediate flower morphology. In the 1930s a hybrid was also developed for horticultural purposes. Wikipedia →
Madagascar Rubbervine is flagged invasive in the U.S. These natives fill a similar niche — same growth habit, bloom season, height, and region — so you keep the look and feed local wildlife instead of spreading a problem.
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 11 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
- Flower colour
- Pink AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →✦ Bees 7 bee visitors
7 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Madagascar Rubbervine :
+ 1 more bees → ↑ show fewer
Wildlife & visitors 2 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Madagascar Rubbervine — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
2 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Cryptostegia →
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
McKenzie et al. assigned each species a flower colour with a GPT-4V vision model over iNaturalist photos. We use the confident tier plus a separately-labelled lower-confidence top-up (mostly inconspicuous green/brown flowers), and render it as a small tint — never as an asserted fact, and kept out of the written synopsis.
Honest limits: AI image inference (~87% expert agreement on the confident tier); a decorative, confidence-tiered indicator, not a measured trait.
Sources for this entry (18) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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