Ehrharta erectaLam.

panic veldtgrass

WFO wfo-0000865562 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Ehrharta erecta, photographed by Piermario Maculan
fig. a Piermario Maculan, CC0 1.0 / 2022-05-14 / obs. 197554895

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.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium
The New York Botanical Garden
Accession
1801722
Filed as
Ehrharta erecta Lam.
Det. by
J. Richard Abbott 2015-01-01
Collected
P. Rubtzoff 1965-04-02
Origin
US
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 23 botanical countries

Regions where Ehrharta erecta is native: Botswana, Cape Provinces, DR Congo, Eritrea, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Free State, Kenya, KwaZulu-Natal, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Northern Provinces, Réunion, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan-South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, Yemen BotswanaCape ProvincesDR CongoEritreaEswatiniEthiopiaFree StateKenyaKwaZulu-NatalLesothoMalawiMozambiqueNorthern ProvincesRwandaSomaliaSudan-South SudanTanzaniaUgandaZambiaZimbabweSaudi ArabiaYemen Réunion
Native distribution of Ehrharta erecta, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Botswana BOT AFRICA
Cape Provinces CPP
DR Congo ZAI
Eritrea ERI
Eswatini SWZ
Ethiopia ETH
Free State OFS
Kenya KEN
KwaZulu-Natal NAT
Lesotho LES
Malawi MLW
Mozambique MOZ
Northern Provinces TVL
Réunion REU
Rwanda RWA
Somalia SOM
Sudan-South Sudan SUD
Tanzania TAN
Uganda UGA
Zambia ZAM
Zimbabwe ZIM
Saudi Arabia SAU ASIA-TEMPERATE
Yemen YEM

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 154 in flower of 306 examined

Proportion of examined Ehrharta erecta in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 8 18 44% 25% to 66%
Feb 4 19 21% 9% to 43%
Mar 11 30 37% 22% to 54%
Apr 30 75 40% 30% to 51%
May 11 27 41% 25% to 59%
Jun 14 20 70% 48% to 85%
Jul 9 11 82% 52% to 95%
Aug 9 14 64% 39% to 84%
Sep 8 14 57% 33% to 79%
Oct 20 25 80% 61% to 91%
Nov 12 26 46% 29% to 65%
Dec 18 27 67% 48% to 81%

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Ehrharta erecta 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. 154 of 306 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 2,024 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 2.8 °C 6.9 °C 10.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 17.7 °C 22.9 °C 28.5 °C
Annual rainfall 315 mm 764 mm 1,530 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 4 mm 139 mm 269 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 2,024 research-grade observations of Ehrharta erecta 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 13 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.

  • Ehrharta abyssinica Hochst.
  • Ehrharta deflexa Pignatti
  • Ehrharta erecta var. abyssinica (Hochst.) Pilg.
  • Ehrharta erecta var. erecta
  • Ehrharta erecta var. natalensis Stapf
  • Ehrharta panicea Sm.
  • Ehrharta panicea var. cuspidata Nees
  • Ehrharta panicea var. mucronata Nees
  • Ehrharta paniciformis Nees
  • Ehrharta paniciformis Nees ex Trin.
  • Panicum deflexum Guss. ex Ten.
  • Trochera panicea (Sm.) Kuntze
  • Trochera paniciformis (Nees) Kuntze

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. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. 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.