Cliffortia heterophylla

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Cliffortia heterophylla, photographed by Jeremy Gilmore — fig. b Jeremy Gilmore, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 135558979

Cliffortia heterophylla, photographed by magriet b — fig. c magriet b, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 131674143

Cliffortia heterophylla, photographed by Chris Vynbos — fig. d Chris Vynbos, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 29029219

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: Smithsonian, US National Herbarium
Accession: US 2831357
Filed as: Cliffortia heterophylla Weim.
Det. by: not recorded on this sheet
Collected: R. Bayliss 1974-10-16
Origin: ZA
The sheet: View the digitised specimen (CC0 1.0)

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

Native distribution of Cliffortia 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.

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 65 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	10.1 °C	10.5 °C	11.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	20.9 °C	21.7 °C	22.0 °C
Annual rainfall	1,050 mm	1,112 mm	1,351 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	119 mm	125 mm	149 mm

It is not found anywhere that gets close to freezing. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 65 research-grade observations of Cliffortia 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.

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.