Bridsonia chamaedendrum (small goorappel)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Bridsonia chamaedendrum, photographed by Andrew Hankey — fig. a Andrew Hankey, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-03-25 / obs. 186188061

Bridsonia chamaedendrum, photographed by James Deacon — fig. b James Deacon, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 171170451

Bridsonia chamaedendrum, photographed by Matthew Fainman — fig. c Matthew Fainman, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 159340964

Bridsonia chamaedendrum, photographed by Marianne Le Roux — fig. f Marianne Le Roux, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 104700599

Bridsonia chamaedendrum, photographed by Mahomed Desai — fig. h Mahomed Desai, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 100394425

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 5 botanical countries

Native distribution of Bridsonia chamaedendrum, 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
Eswatini	SWZ
Free State	OFS
KwaZulu-Natal	NAT
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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 122 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	0.2 °C	2.7 °C	6.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	21.5 °C	24.3 °C	26.9 °C
Annual rainfall	645 mm	862 mm	1,127 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	18 mm	36 mm	59 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 122 research-grade observations of Bridsonia chamaedendrum 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 12 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.

Canthium chamaedendrum Kuntze
Fadogia humilis J.M.Wood & M.S.Evans
Fadogia humilis Wood & Evans
Pachystigma humile
Pachystigma humilis (J.M.Wood & M.S.Evans) Bews
Plectronia chamaedendrum Kuntze
Pygmaeothamnus chamaedendrum (Kuntze) Robyns
Pygmaeothamnus chamaedendrum var. chamaedendrum
Pygmaeothamnus chamaedendrum var. setulosus Robyns
Pygmaeothamnus longipes Robyns
Pygmaeothamnus pilosus Robyns
Vangueria longipes Conrath ex Burtt Davy

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.