Aizoon pubescens (coastal galenia)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Aizoon pubescens, photographed by Kym Nicolson — fig. a Kym Nicolson, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-02 / obs. 194251648

Aizoon pubescens, photographed by Caroline Voget — fig. b Caroline Voget, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 194427167

Aizoon pubescens, photographed by Rosalie Lawrence — fig. d Rosalie Lawrence, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 178988535

Aizoon pubescens, photographed by Elspeth Swan — fig. e Elspeth Swan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 179348785

Aizoon pubescens, photographed by Tony Rebelo — fig. f Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 177808988

Aizoon pubescens, photographed by Rod Lowther — fig. g Rod Lowther, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 167036676

Aizoon pubescens, photographed by Dylan Wishart — fig. h Dylan Wishart, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 164872284

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.

Native range 3 botanical countries

Native distribution of Aizoon pubescens, 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
Cape Provinces	CPP	AFRICA
Free State	OFS
Northern Provinces	TVL

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.

Flowering 228 in flower of 264 examined

90%

88%

70%

75%

93%

89%

50%

71%

86%

96%

93%

100%

Proportion of examined Aizoon pubescens in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	18	20	90%	70% to 97%
Feb	15	17	88%	66% to 97%
Mar	16	23	70%	49% to 84%
Apr	27	36	75%	59% to 86%
May	14	15	93%	70% to 99%
Jun	8	9	89%	56% to 98%
Jul	5	10	50%	24% to 76%
Aug	5	7	71%	36% to 92%
Sep	18	21	86%	65% to 95%
Oct	27	28	96%	82% to 99%
Nov	39	42	93%	81% to 98%
Dec	36	36	100%	90% to 100%

Peak flowering in Dec. Each bar is the share of Aizoon pubescens 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. 228 of 264 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 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 1,408 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	5.2 °C	7.9 °C	10.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	20.8 °C	25.0 °C	29.1 °C
Annual rainfall	347 mm	577 mm	786 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	5 mm	104 mm	144 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,408 research-grade observations of Aizoon pubescens 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 7 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.

Galenia heterophylla Fenzl ex Sond.
Galenia pubescens (Eckl. & Zeyh.) Druce
Galenia pubescens var. cerosa Adamson
Galenia pubescens var. fourcadei Adamson
Galenia pubescens var. lignosa Adamson
Galenia pubescens var. pubescens
Galenia spathulata Fenzl ex Sond.

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.
USDA PLANTS Database. common name, checklist symbol GAPU80. public domain. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.