Berkheya heterophyllaO.Hoffm.

prickly gousblom

WFO wfo-0000120718 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Berkheya heterophylla, photographed by Shaun Swanepoel
fig. a Shaun Swanepoel, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-11-14 / obs. 169066585

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
K001790129
Filed as
Berkheya heterophylla (Thunb.) O.Hoffm.
Det. by
Roessler, H.
Collected
Zeyher; Wallich 1847-01-01
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 1 botanical country

Regions where Berkheya heterophylla is native: Cape Provinces Cape Provinces
Native distribution of Berkheya heterophylla, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
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.

Flowering 52 in flower of 62 examined

Proportion of examined Berkheya heterophylla in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 2 3 too few examined
Feb 0 0 too few examined
Mar 1 2 too few examined
Apr 0 2 too few examined
May 0 0 too few examined
Jun 0 0 too few examined
Jul 2 2 too few examined
Aug 1 1 too few examined
Sep 0 2 too few examined
Oct 10 11 91% 62% to 98%
Nov 21 21 100% 85% to 100%
Dec 15 18 83% 61% to 94%

Peak flowering in Nov. Each bar is the share of Berkheya heterophylla 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. 52 of 62 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 9 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 92 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 3.9 °C 6.8 °C 12.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 23.7 °C 26.4 °C 29.6 °C
Annual rainfall 337 mm 521 mm 831 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 41 mm 89 mm 149 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 92 research-grade observations of Berkheya heterophylla 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.

  • Apuleia heterophylla Less.
  • Crocodilodes biloba Kuntze
  • Crocodilodes heterophylla Kuntze
  • Stobaea biloba DC.
  • Stobaea heterophylla Thunb.
  • Stobaea heterophylla var. heterophylla
  • Stobaea heterophylla var. radiata DC.

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.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. 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.