Heliophila diffusaDC.

WFO wfo-0001216963 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.

Heliophila diffusa, photographed by Tony Rebelo
fig. a Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2020-10-11 / obs. 104257709
Heliophila diffusa, photographed by Tony Rebelo
fig. b Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 104257834
Heliophila diffusa, photographed by Tony Rebelo
fig. c Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 104257703

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
03377099
Filed as
Heliophila diffusa var. diffusa
Det. by
I. A. Al-Shehbaz 2019-01-01
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 1 botanical country

Regions where Heliophila diffusa is native: Cape Provinces Cape Provinces
Native distribution of Heliophila diffusa, 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 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.

  • Aubrieta diffusa Spreng.
  • Aubrieta lepidioides Spreng.
  • Aurinia capensis Desv.
  • Clypeola capensis Poir.
  • Farsetia diffusa Desv.
  • Farsetia pinnata Desv.
  • Heliophila capensis (L.f.) C.A.Sm.
  • Heliophila flacca Sond.
  • Heliophila lepidioides Link
  • Heliophila peltaria DC.
  • Lunaria diffusa Thunb.
  • Lunaria pinnata Thunb.
  • Peltaria capensis L.f.
  • Selenocarpaea diffusa Eckl. & Zeyh.
  • Selenocarpaea pinnata Eckl. & Zeyh.
  • Trentepohlia lepidioides Roth.

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. 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.