Dracaena pearsonii (Spiky mother-in-law's tongue)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 7 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 7 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Dracaena pearsonii, photographed by Suvarna Parbhoo Mohan — fig. a Suvarna Parbhoo Mohan, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-03-08 / obs. 182186458

Dracaena pearsonii, photographed by Tony Rebelo — fig. b Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 24831331

Dracaena pearsonii, photographed by Andrew Deacon — fig. d Andrew Deacon, CC0 1.0 / obs. 15583773

Dracaena pearsonii, photographed by Brian du Preez — fig. g Brian du Preez, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 15334794

Dracaena pearsonii, photographed by Nic Knott-Craig — fig. h Nic Knott-Craig, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 112690485

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 Dracaena pearsonii, 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
Angola	ANG	AFRICA
KwaZulu-Natal	NAT
Namibia	NAM
Northern Provinces	TVL

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.

Also published as 3 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.

Sansevieria deserti N.E.Br.
Sansevieria pearsonii N.E.Br.
Sansevieria rhodesiana N.E.Br.

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.
USDA PLANTS Database. common name, checklist symbol SAPE22. public domain. 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.