Aloe ferox (Cape aloe)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Aloe ferox, photographed by Justin Ponder — fig. a Justin Ponder, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-04 / obs. 203854699

Aloe ferox, photographed by Di Turner — fig. b Di Turner, CC0 1.0 / obs. 195351180

Aloe ferox, photographed by Shaun Swanepoel — fig. d Shaun Swanepoel, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 191774858

Aloe ferox, photographed by Matthew Fainman — fig. h Matthew Fainman, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 172780321

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: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Accession: K000256703
Filed as: Aloe ferox Mill.
Det. by: Unknown
Collected: Bolus
Origin: ZA
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 Aloe ferox, 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
Lesotho	LES

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 1,137 in flower of 4,778 examined

22%

55%

52%

33%

10%

Proportion of examined Aloe ferox in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	4	177	2%	1% to 6%
Feb	5	176	3%	1% to 6%
Mar	9	191	5%	3% to 9%
Apr	24	491	5%	3% to 7%
May	104	468	22%	19% to 26%
Jun	367	667	55%	51% to 59%
Jul	340	649	52%	49% to 56%
Aug	226	685	33%	30% to 37%
Sep	41	408	10%	7% to 13%
Oct	11	394	3%	2% to 5%
Nov	3	281	1%	0% to 3%
Dec	3	191	2%	1% to 5%

Peak flowering in Jun. Each bar is the share of Aloe ferox 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. 1,137 of 4,778 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 1,998 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	3.4 °C	6.9 °C	11.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	23.9 °C	27.2 °C	30.1 °C
Annual rainfall	317 mm	564 mm	824 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	42 mm	84 mm	122 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,998 research-grade observations of Aloe ferox 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 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.

Aloe ferox var. galpinii (Baker) Reynolds
Aloe ferox var. incurvata Baker
Aloe ferox var. subferox (Spreng.) Baker
Aloe galpinii Baker
Aloe horrida Haw.
Aloe pallancae Guillaumin
Aloe perfoliata var. ferox (Mill.) Aiton
Aloe pseudoferox Salm-Dyck
Aloe subferox Spreng.
Aloe supralaevis Haw.
Aloe supralaevis var. erythrocarpa Baker
Busipho ferox (Mill.) Salisb.
Pachidendron ferox (Mill.) Haw.
Pachidendron pseudoferox (Salm-Dyck) Haw.
Pachidendron supralaeve (Haw.) Haw.

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.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. 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.