Acaena anserinifolia(J.R.Forst. & G.Forst.) J.B.Armstr.

WFO wfo-0001013022 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Acaena anserinifolia, photographed by Joe Dillon
fig. a Joe Dillon, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-04-29 / obs. 192592111

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.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium
The New York Botanical Garden
Accession
04791957
Filed as
Acaena anserinifolia subsp. anserinifolia
Det. by
not recorded on this sheet
Collected
R. A. Dyer 1937-03-01
Origin
SH
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Flowering 143 in flower of 216 examined

Proportion of examined Acaena anserinifolia in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 29 42 69% 54% to 81%
Feb 1 8 13% 2% to 47%
Mar 3 17 18% 6% to 41%
Apr 0 13 0% 0% to 23%
May 0 3 too few examined
Jun 1 3 too few examined
Jul 0 3 too few examined
Aug 1 2 too few examined
Sep 0 4 too few examined
Oct 6 9 67% 35% to 88%
Nov 45 52 87% 75% to 93%
Dec 57 60 95% 86% to 98%

Peak flowering in Dec. Each bar is the share of Acaena anserinifolia 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. 143 of 216 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 5 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. 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 1,519 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -3.7 °C 2.1 °C 8.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 14.6 °C 17.7 °C 21.5 °C
Annual rainfall 860 mm 1,618 mm 4,900 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 177 mm 337 mm 1,060 mm

It is found where winters bring light frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,519 research-grade observations of Acaena anserinifolia 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 13 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.

  • Acaena anserinifolia var. microphylla Domin
  • Acaena pusilla (Bitter) Allan
  • Acaena pusilla var. suprasericascens Bitter
  • Acaena sanguisorbae L.f. ex Vahl
  • Acaena sanguisorbae subsp. pusilla Bitter
  • Acaena sanguisorbae var. epilasia Bitter
  • Acaena sanguisorbae var. obtusata Bitter
  • Acaena sanguisorbae var. suprasericascens Bitter
  • Acaena sanguisorbae var. viridior Cockayne
  • Acaena viridior (Cockayne) Allan
  • Ancistrum anserinaefolium J.R.Forst. & G.Forst.
  • Ancistrum anserinifolium J.R.Forst. & G.Forst.
  • Ancistrum sanguisorbae L.f.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.

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. It has no native range either: Kew's checklist does not cover this taxon.