Athanasia capitata

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Athanasia capitata, photographed by douglaseustonbrown — fig. b douglaseustonbrown, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 64683153

Athanasia capitata, photographed by Jacques van der Merwe — fig. c Jacques van der Merwe, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 105598975

Athanasia capitata, photographed by Tony Rebelo — fig. e Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 15206683

Athanasia capitata, photographed by Paul Emms — fig. f Paul Emms, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 134777426

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 1 botanical country

Native distribution of Athanasia capitata, 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

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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 104 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	6.6 °C	7.6 °C	8.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	25.7 °C	27.3 °C	29.1 °C
Annual rainfall	816 mm	996 mm	1,790 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	68 mm	84 mm	153 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 104 research-grade observations of Athanasia capitata 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 Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.

Also published as 11 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.

Athanasia capitata var. capitata
Athanasia capitata var. glabrata Harv.
Athanasia lanuginosa Cav.
Athanasia punctata Thunb.
Athanasia punctata P.J.Bergius
Holophyllum capitatum Less.
Holophyllum capitatum var. capitatum
Holophyllum capitatum var. glabratum DC.
Holophyllum scabrum DC.
Pristocarpha capitata E.Mey. ex DC.
Santolina capitata L.

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.