Conicosia pugioniformis (narrow-leaved iceplant)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Conicosia pugioniformis, photographed by Nathanael Aff — fig. a Nathanael Aff, CC0 1.0 / 2022-05-07 / obs. 195866447

Conicosia pugioniformis, photographed by Justin Ponder — fig. b Justin Ponder, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 192363964

Conicosia pugioniformis, photographed by Melissa McMasters — fig. c Melissa McMasters, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 183594147

Conicosia pugioniformis, photographed by Chuck Wilson — fig. d Chuck Wilson, CC0 1.0 / obs. 178779040

Conicosia pugioniformis, photographed by Matt Muir — fig. e Matt Muir, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 174775416

Conicosia pugioniformis, photographed by Trevor Van Loon — fig. g Trevor Van Loon, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 160967311

Conicosia pugioniformis, photographed by Dan Horowitz — fig. h Dan Horowitz, CC0 1.0 / obs. 156385501

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 Conicosia pugioniformis, 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.

Flowering 149 in flower of 178 examined

75%

57%

85%

75%

100%

74%

92%

73%

95%

88%

87%

86%

Proportion of examined Conicosia pugioniformis in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	6	8	75%	41% to 93%
Feb	4	7	57%	25% to 84%
Mar	11	13	85%	58% to 96%
Apr	15	20	75%	53% to 89%
May	16	16	100%	81% to 100%
Jun	14	19	74%	51% to 88%
Jul	12	13	92%	67% to 99%
Aug	11	15	73%	48% to 89%
Sep	18	19	95%	75% to 99%
Oct	23	26	88%	71% to 96%
Nov	13	15	87%	62% to 96%
Dec	6	7	86%	49% to 97%

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Conicosia pugioniformis 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. 149 of 178 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 1,197 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	7.0 °C	9.0 °C	11.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	16.5 °C	21.6 °C	26.4 °C
Annual rainfall	456 mm	568 mm	884 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	4 mm	8 mm	125 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 1,197 research-grade observations of Conicosia pugioniformis 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 22 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.

Conicosia alborosea L.Bolus
Conicosia australis L.Bolus
Conicosia bijlii N.E.Br.
Conicosia brevicaulis (Haw.) Schwantes
Conicosia capensis N.E.Br.
Conicosia capitata (Haw.) Schwantes
Conicosia communis N.E.Br.
Conicosia coruscans (Haw.) Schwantes ex H.Jacobsen
Conicosia coruscans (Haw.) Schwantes
Conicosia muirii N.E.Br.
Conicosia pulliloba N.E.Br.
Herrea caledonica L.Bolus
Herrea conicosioides Schwantes
Mesembryanthemum brevicaule Haw.
Mesembryanthemum capitatum Haw.
Mesembryanthemum capitatum var. ramigerum Haw.
Mesembryanthemum corniculatum Haw.
Mesembryanthemum coruscans Haw.
Mesembryanthemum pugioniforme L.
Mesembryanthemum pugioniforme var. bienne Haw.
Mesembryanthemum pugioniforme var. carneum Haw.
Mesembryanthemum pugioniforme var. purpureum 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.