Cyrtanthus elatus

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Cyrtanthus elatus, photographed by Shaun Swanepoel — fig. b Shaun Swanepoel, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 109005852

Cyrtanthus elatus, photographed by Ludwig Muller — fig. c Ludwig Muller, CC0 1.0 / obs. 106538948

Cyrtanthus elatus, photographed by Di Turner — fig. d Di Turner, CC0 1.0 / obs. 32161493

Cyrtanthus elatus, photographed by farahhancock — fig. e farahhancock, CC0 1.0 / obs. 51273254

Cyrtanthus elatus, photographed by Nicola van Berkel — fig. h Nicola van Berkel, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 15199553

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 Cyrtanthus elatus, 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 158 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	2.4 °C	8.3 °C	11.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	20.5 °C	24.2 °C	25.1 °C
Annual rainfall	650 mm	700 mm	1,425 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	122 mm	131 mm	235 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 158 research-grade observations of Cyrtanthus elatus 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 16 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.

Amaryllis elata Jacq.
Amaryllis mexicana hort. ex Savi
Amaryllis purpurea Aiton
Amaryllis speciosa (L.f.) L'Hér.
Crinum speciosum L.f.
Cyrtanthus purpureus Herb.
Cyrtanthus purpureus (Ait.) Traub
Cyrtanthus purpureus f. albus Baker ex Traub
Cyrtanthus speciosus (L.f.) Traub
Cyrtanthus speciosus f. albus (Baker ex Traub) Traub
Cyrtanthus speciosus f. magnificus (Baker) Traub
Vallota elata (Jacq.) M.Roem.
Vallota grandiflora Carrière
Vallota purpurea Herb.
Vallota purpurea var. magnifica Baker
Vallota speciosa (L.f.) T.Durand & Schinz

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.