Gerbera viridifolia

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Gerbera viridifolia, photographed by Matthew Fainman — fig. b Matthew Fainman, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 166762526

Gerbera viridifolia, photographed by Innes Buchner — fig. g Innes Buchner, CC0 1.0 / obs. 164190264

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: K000252185
Filed as: Gerbera viridifolia subsp. viridifolia
Det. by: Hansen, H.V.
Collected: Burtt-Davy, J. 1904-10-27
Origin: ZA
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 21 botanical countries

Native distribution of Gerbera viridifolia, 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
Burundi	BUR
Cameroon	CMN
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
Somalia	SOM
Sudan-South Sudan	SUD
Tanzania	TAN
Uganda	UGA
Zambia	ZAM
Zimbabwe	ZIM

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 35 in flower of 38 examined

95%

86%

83%

Proportion of examined Gerbera viridifolia in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	0	too few examined
Feb	0	0	too few examined
Mar	0	0	too few examined
Apr	1	1	too few examined
May	2	2	too few examined
Jun	0	0	too few examined
Jul	0	0	too few examined
Aug	0	0	too few examined
Sep	19	20	95%	76% to 99%
Oct	6	7	86%	49% to 97%
Nov	5	6	83%	44% to 97%
Dec	2	2	too few examined

Peak flowering in Sep. Each bar is the share of Gerbera viridifolia 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. 35 of 38 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 9 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 340 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	2.0 °C	3.9 °C	6.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	24.2 °C	26.0 °C	27.8 °C
Annual rainfall	638 mm	722 mm	1,024 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	15 mm	18 mm	50 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 340 research-grade observations of Gerbera viridifolia 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 16 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.

Gerbera abyssinica Sch.Bip. ex A.Rich.
Gerbera abyssinica Sch.Bip.
Gerbera burchellii Dümmer
Gerbera conrathii Thell.
Gerbera glandulosa Dümmer
Gerbera glandulosa Thell.
Gerbera lasiopus Baker
Gerbera plantaginea Harv.
Gerbera plantaginea var. plantaginea
Gerbera plantaginea var. pusilla Dummer
Gerbera speciosa S.Moore
Gerbera viridiflora Walp.
Lasiopus viridifolius DC.
Lasiopus viridifolius var. hirsutus DC.
Lasiopus viridifolius var. viridifolius
Perdicium abyssinicum Hiern

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.