Crassula capitellaThunb.

WFO wfo-0000624875 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Crassula capitella, photographed by melda
fig. a melda, CC0 1.0 / 2021-11-06 / obs. 168345810

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

Regions where Crassula capitella is native: Cape Provinces, Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Lesotho, Namibia Cape ProvincesFree StateKwaZulu-NatalLesothoNamibia
Native distribution of Crassula capitella, 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
Free State OFS
KwaZulu-Natal NAT
Lesotho LES
Namibia NAM

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 64 in flower of 145 examined

Proportion of examined Crassula capitella in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 5 15 33% 15% to 58%
Feb 2 16 13% 4% to 36%
Mar 27 31 87% 71% to 95%
Apr 16 24 67% 47% to 82%
May 9 11 82% 52% to 95%
Jun 1 3 too few examined
Jul 1 4 too few examined
Aug 1 7 14% 3% to 51%
Sep 0 9 0% 0% to 30%
Oct 0 8 0% 0% to 32%
Nov 0 8 0% 0% to 32%
Dec 2 9 22% 6% to 55%

Peak flowering in Mar. Each bar is the share of Crassula capitella 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. 64 of 145 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 2 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 708 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 1.7 °C 6.1 °C 11.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 24.4 °C 28.4 °C 31.1 °C
Annual rainfall 268 mm 470 mm 752 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 18 mm 62 mm 114 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 708 research-grade observations of Crassula capitella 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 36 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.

  • Aloe pertusa Haw.
  • Crassula afraria Hunnem. ex Link & Otto
  • Crassula albanensis Schönland
  • Crassula brevistyla Baker f.
  • Crassula caffraria Hunnem. ex Link & Otto
  • Crassula capitellata DC.
  • Crassula corymbosula Link & Otto
  • Crassula corymbulosa Link
  • Crassula impressa D.Dietr.
  • Crassula luederitzi Schönland
  • Crassula meyeri Harv.
  • Crassula nuda Compton
  • Crassula paniculata D.Dietr.
  • Crassula punctata L.
  • Crassula rhodogyna Friedrich
  • Crassula rodogyna Friedrich
  • Crassula rufo-punctata Schönland
  • Crassula spicata Thunb.
  • Crassula subbifaria Schönland
  • Crassula thyrsiflora Thunb.
  • Crassula turrita Thunb.
  • Crassula turrita var. latifolia Harv.
  • Globulea impressa Haw.
  • Globulea paniculata Haw.

and 12 more.

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. 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.