Lasiosiphon capitatus(Lam.) Burtt Davy

WFO wfo-0001142396 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Lasiosiphon capitatus, photographed by Matthew Fainman
fig. a Matthew Fainman, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-12-30 / obs. 174232965
Lasiosiphon capitatus, photographed by Andrew Hankey
fig. b Andrew Hankey, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 171863671
Lasiosiphon capitatus, photographed by Suvarna Parbhoo Mohan
fig. c Suvarna Parbhoo Mohan, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 172472215
Lasiosiphon capitatus, photographed by Matthew Fainman
fig. d Matthew Fainman, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 165531879
Lasiosiphon capitatus, photographed by Matthew Fainman
fig. e Matthew Fainman, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 165359936
Lasiosiphon capitatus, photographed by Matthew Fainman
fig. f Matthew Fainman, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 162933787
Lasiosiphon capitatus, photographed by Andrew Deacon
fig. g Andrew Deacon, CC0 1.0 / obs. 164157742
Lasiosiphon capitatus, photographed by Matthew Fainman
fig. h Matthew Fainman, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 149350209

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 8 botanical countries

Regions where Lasiosiphon capitatus is native: Angola, Botswana, Eswatini, Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Mozambique, Northern Provinces, Zimbabwe AngolaBotswanaEswatiniFree StateKwaZulu-NatalMozambiqueNorthern ProvincesZimbabwe
Native distribution of Lasiosiphon capitatus, 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
Angola ANG AFRICA
Botswana BOT
Eswatini SWZ
Free State OFS
KwaZulu-Natal NAT
Mozambique MOZ
Northern Provinces TVL
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 59 in flower of 60 examined

Peak flowering in Sep. Each bar is the share of Lasiosiphon capitatus 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. 59 of 60 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 460 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 2.5 °C 4.8 °C 12.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 24.5 °C 26.9 °C 29.5 °C
Annual rainfall 575 mm 712 mm 990 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 14 mm 19 mm 97 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 460 research-grade observations of Lasiosiphon capitatus 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 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.

  • Dais linifolia Lam.
  • Gnidia capitata L.f.
  • Gnidia capitata var. glabrata Meisn.
  • Gnidia capitata var. pubescens Meisn.
  • Gnidia daphnifolia var. hirsuta L.f.
  • Gnidia linifolia (Lam.) Gilg
  • Gnidia transvaaliensis Gilg
  • Lasiosiphon linifolius (Lam.) Decne.
  • Lasiosiphon linifolius var. glabrata (Meisn.) Meisn.
  • Lasiosiphon linifolius var. glabratus (Meisn.) Meisn.
  • Lasiosiphon linifolius var. pubescens (Meisn.) Meisn.
  • Lasiosiphon similis C.H.Wright
  • Passerina involucrata Spreng. ex Meisn.

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.