Ixia scillaris | BotanAI

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Ixia scillaris, photographed by James Deacon — fig. a James Deacon, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2021-10-14 / obs. 163597674

Ixia scillaris, photographed by douglaseustonbrown — fig. b douglaseustonbrown, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 166415098

Ixia scillaris, photographed by De Waal Hugo — fig. d De Waal Hugo, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 102735495

Ixia scillaris, photographed by Brian du Preez — fig. e Brian du Preez, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 65685037

Ixia scillaris, photographed by linkie — fig. f linkie, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 11494763

Ixia scillaris, photographed by Sam McCarren — fig. h Sam McCarren, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 99056152

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

Native distribution of Ixia scillaris, 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
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.

Flowering 56 in flower of 57 examined

97%

100%

Proportion of examined Ixia scillaris 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	0	0	too few examined
May	0	0	too few examined
Jun	0	0	too few examined
Jul	0	0	too few examined
Aug	4	4	too few examined
Sep	35	36	97%	86% to 100%
Oct	14	14	100%	78% to 100%
Nov	2	2	too few examined
Dec	1	1	too few examined

Peak flowering in Oct. Each bar is the share of Ixia scillaris 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. 56 of 57 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 10 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 224 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	4.6 °C	7.8 °C	11.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	19.8 °C	26.3 °C	31.4 °C
Annual rainfall	395 mm	969 mm	2,538 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	31 mm	85 mm	240 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 224 research-grade observations of Ixia scillaris 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 18 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.

Agretta pentandra (L.f.) Eckl.
Gladiolus burmanni Schrank
Gladiolus ramosus L.
Hesperantha pentandra Drège ex Baker
Ixia pentandra L.f.
Ixia polystachya var. incarnata Andrews
Ixia reflexa Andrews
Ixia rotata Ker Gawl.
Ixia scillaris subsp. latifolia Goldblatt & J.C.Manning
Ixia scillaris var. angustifolia Ker Gawl.
Ixia scillaris var. latifolia Ker Gawl.
Ixia scillaris var. scillaris
Ixia scillaris var. subundulata G.J.Lewis
Melasphaerula ramosa (L.) Klatt
Phalangium ramosum (L.) Burm.f.
Tritonia scillaris (L.) Baker
Tritonia stricta Eckl. ex Klatt
Tritonixia scillaris (L.) Klatt

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.