Distribution : "Riverbanks, lake shores, margins of ponds and ditches, seasonally wet savannas, becoming colonially weedy in disturbed brush-woodland, pastures, orchards and plantations, along roads and in waste places, mostly below 500 m but ascending to 1050 m on the Brazilian Planalto and up to 2000 m in New Guinea, native probably along rivers of the Guianas and perhaps around the periphery of the Orinoco and Amazon basins in Venezuela, Brazil and Colombia, now fully but erratically naturalized in the wet and seasonally humid Neo- and Paleotropics, in the New World from s. Mexico (Nayarite. through Balsas Depression to s. Oaxaca and the Gulf lowlands) to n.-centr. Colombia, and through the Greater Antilles (Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico) and the Leeward and Windward Is. to Trinidad; from the Maracaibo and Orinoco basins in Venezuela s. and s.-e. through the Guianas and the Amazon delta region to Ceara, coastal Bahia, the highlands of s.-centr. Goias, and less commonly on the sources of the Amazon from s.-e. Ecuador to n.-e. Bolivia, thence s., probably or certainly adventive, to Paraguay, n. Argentina (Corrientes) and coastal s.-e. Brazil (Parana, Santa Catarina); cultivated in warm temperate United States, especially on the Gulf Coastal Plain and in s. California, locally spontaneous in peninsular Florida; fully established by mid-XVII century in Java and now widespread, both as a weed and in cultivation for medicine and ornament, through equatorial Africa and from s. India and Sri Lanka to s. China and the Philippines, thence extending through Malesia to n. Australia and e. through Micronesia to the Society and Hawaiian Is." (Irwin & Barneby 1982; voir aussi
GBIF).
