Hymenophyllum scabrum

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Hymenophyllum scabrum, photographed by Paul Bell-Butler — fig. b Paul Bell-Butler, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 174778396

Hymenophyllum scabrum, photographed by Lisa Bennett — fig. d Lisa Bennett, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 157026136

Hymenophyllum scabrum, photographed by Alice Shanks — fig. f Alice Shanks, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 114900189

Hymenophyllum scabrum, photographed by Pieter Pelser — fig. h Pieter Pelser, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 109262867

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 3 botanical countries

Native distribution of Hymenophyllum scabrum, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Chatham Is.	CTM	AUSTRALASIA
New Zealand North	NZN
New Zealand South	NZS

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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 587 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	1.1 °C	4.7 °C	8.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	17.1 °C	19.4 °C	21.8 °C
Annual rainfall	1,225 mm	1,725 mm	4,230 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	230 mm	336 mm	924 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 587 research-grade observations of Hymenophyllum scabrum 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.

Also published as 5 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.

Hymenophyllum scabrum var. hirtum Colenso
Mecodium scabrum (A.Rich.) Copel.
Sphaerocionium glanduliferum C.Presl
Sphaerocionium glauduliferum C.Presl
Sphaerocionium scabrum (A.Rich.) C.Presl

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.