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Plant

Purple cestrum

Cestrum elegans

IUCN: Least Concern
Purple cestrum (Cestrum elegans) photographed by Devendra Bhardwaj

Image: Devendra Bhardwaj · iNaturalist · CC BY-NC 4.0 · Jhalana Doongri, Jaipur, Rajasthan · Resized

Scientific name
Cestrum elegans
Family
Solanaceae, order Solanales
Group
Plant
Conservation status
Least Concern

Rich red-purple tubes beloved by sunbirds.

  • Spot it Drooping clusters of reddish-purple tube flowers on a shrub.
  • Home Gardens and hedges.
  • Food web Sunbirds and bees sip its nectar; birds eat the berries.
  • Why it matters Winter nectar for pollinators, helping pollination when flowers are few.

Read more: Cestrum elegans on Wikipedia

Sources and credits

Records and field notes

  • RajasthanDevendra Bhardwaj has 1 verified record of this species on iNaturalist in 2009, in Jaipur.[20]

Sources

  1. IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (species pages linked on each entry) (database). Global conservation status. Every species page was opened.
  2. Devendra Bhardwaj. iNaturalist observations and notes, with place and date (inaturalist.org/people/devendrabhardwaj) (field record). The observer's own dated records and notes, with places. Statements in his notes are his own and were not independently checked by KJVF.
  3. GBIF Backbone Taxonomy and GBIF species data (family, order, Hindi names, IUCN category) (database). Open biodiversity data. Used for classification, Hindi common names and the IUCN category where one is given.
  4. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (opening lines of each species article, CC BY-SA 4.0). The link on each entry goes to the article (reference). Not peer reviewed. Only the opening description is used, and statements about origin or medicinal use are left out.
  5. Short introductions and key points written with AI help (Google Gemini and Claude) and checked against GBIF where possible (reference). AI-assisted text for general readers. Please check important details before relying on them.

The tag before each record shows the place it was checked for.

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