Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations
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
| 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.
Where it actually grows measured, from 204 observations
| Condition | 5th percentile | Median | 95th percentile |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coldest month, mean daily low | 2.0 °C | 5.4 °C | 11.0 °C |
| Warmest month, mean daily high | 20.9 °C | 25.3 °C | 30.0 °C |
| Annual rainfall | 484 mm | 1,286 mm | 2,373 mm |
| Rainfall in the driest quarter | 49 mm | 124 mm | 243 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 204 research-grade observations of Isolepis digitata 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 Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.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 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.
- Eleocharis flexifolia Rchb. ex C.B.Clarke
- Eleogiton digitata (Nees ex Schrad.) Nees
- Eleogiton digitata var. dissoluta Nees
- Eleogiton digitatus (Nees ex Schrad.) Nees
- Eleogiton longifolia Nees
- Eleogiton longifolius Nees
- Isolepis dissoluta (Nees) Kunth
- Isolepis dubia Kunth
- Rhynchospora glomerata Vahl ex Kunth
- Rhynchospora oligosantha Endl. ex Kunth
- Schoenus aggregatus Spreng. ex Kunth
- Scirpus digitatus (Nees ex Schrad.) Boeckeler
- Scirpus flaccifolius Steud.
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.