Encephalartos horridus(Jacq.) Lehm.

Eastern Cape Blue CycadEastern Cape blue cycad

WFO wfo-0000667389 Accepted WFO 2026-06 3 photographs CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–c · 1 observation

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 1 time, 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.

Encephalartos horridus, photographed by Dave U
fig. a Dave U, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2021-04-21 / obs. 143689050
Encephalartos horridus, photographed by Dave U
fig. b Dave U, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 143689085
Encephalartos horridus, photographed by Dave U
fig. c Dave U, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 143689149

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

Regions where Encephalartos horridus is native: Cape Provinces Cape Provinces
Native distribution of Encephalartos horridus, 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

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 12 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.

  • Encephalartos altensteinii var. eriocephalus de Vriese
  • Encephalartos horridus var. hallianus (de Vriese) Miq.
  • Encephalartos horridus var. horridus
  • Encephalartos horridus var. nanus (Lehm.) J.Schust.
  • Encephalartos horridus var. van-hallii (de Vriese) J.Schust.
  • Encephalartos nanus Lehm.
  • Encephalartos van-hallii de Vriese
  • Zamia aurea hort. ex Miq.
  • Zamia gleina hort. ex Miq.
  • Zamia horrida Jacq.
  • Zamia nana hort. ex Miq.
  • Zamia nana de Vriese

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.