Eriocephalus africanus

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Eriocephalus africanus, photographed by Jared Zachary Herman — fig. b Jared Zachary Herman, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 194282166

Eriocephalus africanus, photographed by Caroline Voget — fig. c Caroline Voget, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 194627996

Eriocephalus africanus, photographed by Dagmar Gleiss — fig. d Dagmar Gleiss, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 194281681

Eriocephalus africanus, photographed by linkie — fig. h linkie, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 195270943

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 Eriocephalus africanus, 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.

Flowering 182 in flower of 247 examined

50%

74%

83%

97%

88%

77%

48%

25%

20%

Proportion of examined Eriocephalus africanus in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	0	too few examined
Feb	1	1	too few examined
Mar	3	6	50%	19% to 81%
Apr	35	47	74%	60% to 85%
May	29	35	83%	67% to 92%
Jun	28	29	97%	83% to 99%
Jul	37	42	88%	75% to 95%
Aug	34	44	77%	63% to 87%
Sep	10	21	48%	28% to 68%
Oct	4	16	25%	10% to 50%
Nov	1	5	20%	4% to 62%
Dec	0	1	too few examined

Peak flowering in Jun. Each bar is the share of Eriocephalus africanus 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. 182 of 247 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 3 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. 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 1,995 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	4.9 °C	9.9 °C	13.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	19.9 °C	24.3 °C	29.9 °C
Annual rainfall	434 mm	814 mm	2,292 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	49 mm	86 mm	211 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,995 research-grade observations of Eriocephalus africanus 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 15 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.

Eriocephalus africanus Burm.f.
Eriocephalus africanus var. africanus
Eriocephalus corymbosus Moench
Eriocephalus frutescens R.Br.
Eriocephalus paniculatus Cass.
Eriocephalus racemosus Gaertn.
Eriocephalus septifer Cass.
Eriocephalus sericeus Gaudich. ex DC.
Eriocephalus umbellulatus Cass.
Eriocephalus umbellulatus DC.
Eriocephalus umbellulatus var. argenteus DC.
Eriocephalus umbellulatus var. glabriusculus DC.
Eriocephalus umbellulatus var. umbellulatus
Eriocephalus variifolius Salisb.
Monochlaena racemosa Cass.

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.