Geranium solanderiCarolin

Solander's geranium

WFO wfo-0000701355 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Geranium solanderi, photographed by Greg Tasney
fig. a Greg Tasney, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-02-19 / obs. 180047919

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
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Accession
K000073841
Filed as
Geranium solanderi Carolin
Det. by
Aedo, C.
Collected
not recorded
Origin
not recorded
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 9 botanical countries

Regions where Geranium solanderi is native: Chatham Is., New South Wales, New Zealand North, New Zealand South, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, Western Australia New South WalesNew Zealand NorthNew Zealand SouthQueenslandSouth AustraliaTasmaniaVictoriaWestern Australia Chatham Is.
Native distribution of Geranium solanderi, 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
Chatham Is. CTM AUSTRALASIA
New South Wales NSW
New Zealand North NZN
New Zealand South NZS
Queensland QLD
South Australia SOA
Tasmania TAS
Victoria VIC
Western Australia WAU

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 197 in flower of 235 examined

Proportion of examined Geranium solanderi in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 21 21 100% 85% to 100%
Feb 16 18 89% 67% to 97%
Mar 12 12 100% 76% to 100%
Apr 20 24 83% 64% to 93%
May 12 13 92% 67% to 99%
Jun 5 7 71% 36% to 92%
Jul 3 7 43% 16% to 75%
Aug 10 18 56% 34% to 75%
Sep 16 24 67% 47% to 82%
Oct 36 39 92% 80% to 97%
Nov 25 28 89% 73% to 96%
Dec 21 24 88% 69% to 96%

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Geranium solanderi 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. 197 of 235 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 431 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 0.5 °C 5.7 °C 9.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 18.1 °C 25.2 °C 29.9 °C
Annual rainfall 600 mm 797 mm 1,412 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 67 mm 137 mm 233 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 431 research-grade observations of Geranium solanderi 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.

  • Geranium carolinianum var. australe (Benth.) Fosberg
  • Geranium carolinii L.P.Sm
  • Geranium ciliocarpum L.P.Sm
  • Geranium dissectum f. tasmanica Gand.
  • Geranium dissectum f. tasmanicum Gand.
  • Geranium dissectum var. australe Benth.
  • Geranium dissectum var. pilosum Hook.f.
  • Geranium dissectum var. tuberosum F. Muell. ex R. Knuth
  • Geranium drummondii Carolin
  • Geranium gardneri de Lange
  • Geranium patulum Sol. ex G.Forst.
  • Geranium pilosum Sol.
  • Geranium pilosum Sol. ex Willd.

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.