Dipcadi brevifolium

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Dipcadi brevifolium, photographed by linkie — fig. b linkie, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 54221463

Dipcadi brevifolium, photographed by Nicola van Berkel — fig. c Nicola van Berkel, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 14557142

Dipcadi brevifolium, photographed by douglaseustonbrown — fig. d douglaseustonbrown, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 15347786

Dipcadi brevifolium, photographed by kevin koen — fig. f kevin koen, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 161694453

Dipcadi brevifolium, photographed by Peter Warren — fig. g Peter Warren, CC0 1.0 / obs. 122353697

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 4 botanical countries

Native distribution of Dipcadi brevifolium, 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. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Cape Provinces	CPP	AFRICA
Madagascar	MDG
Mozambique Channel Is.	MCI
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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 54 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	2.4 °C	7.0 °C	11.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	22.5 °C	27.4 °C	33.1 °C
Annual rainfall	47 mm	459 mm	812 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	7 mm	57 mm	123 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 54 research-grade observations of Dipcadi brevifolium 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 14 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.

Baeoterpe brevifolia (Thunb.) Salisb.
Dipcadi hyacinthoides (P.J.Bergius ex Schltdl.) Baker
Dipcadi spirale Baker
Hyacinthus brevifolius Thunb.
Hyacinthus gawleri Baker
Lachenalia graminifolia Sol. ex Baker
Ornithogalum hyacinthoides (Baker) J.C.Manning & Goldblatt
Periboea brevifolia (Thunb.) Kunth
Periboea gawleri Kunth
Polemannia hyacinthiflora Berg. ex Schlechtd.
Polemannia hyacinthoides P.J.Bergius ex Schltdl.
Scilla brevifolia (Thunb.) Ker Gawl.
Uropetalon hyacinthoides (P.J.Bergius ex Schltdl.) Spreng.
Uropetalum hyacinthoides Spreng.

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.