Acaena leptacantha

Plate 1 figs. a–f · 3 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 3 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Acaena leptacantha, photographed by Nolan Exe — fig. a Nolan Exe, CC BY 4.0 / 2019-12-07 / obs. 60008173

Acaena leptacantha, photographed by Tony Rebelo — fig. b Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 31068406

Acaena leptacantha, photographed by Guillermo Debandi — fig. c Guillermo Debandi, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 60071165

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: 2592566
Filed as: Acaena leptacantha Phil.
Det. by: not recorded on this sheet
Collected: not recorded
Origin: not recorded
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.

Native range 3 botanical countries

Native distribution of Acaena leptacantha, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Argentina South	AGS	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Chile Central	CLC
Chile South	CLS

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Also published as 15 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 andina Phil.
Acaena capitata Phil.
Acaena leptacantha f. inflata Čelak.
Acaena leptacantha f. subsolida Čelak.
Acaena leptacantha subsp. breviscapa Bitter
Acaena leptacantha subsp. connectens Bitter
Acaena leptacantha subsp. glabricupula Bitter
Acaena leptacantha subsp. longiscapa Bitter
Acaena leptacantha var. brachyacantha Bitter
Acaena leptacantha var. conferta Bitter
Acaena leptacantha var. dolichacantha Bitter
Acaena leptacantha var. grosseaculeata Bitter
Acaena leptacantha var. longissima Bitter
Acaena leptacantha var. negeri (Duse) Bitter
Acaena macrocephala var. negeri Duse

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

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.