Ledebouria revoluta

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Ledebouria revoluta, photographed by Mahomed Desai — fig. b Mahomed Desai, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 172034238

Ledebouria revoluta, photographed by Peter Warren — fig. c Peter Warren, CC0 1.0 / obs. 168486100

Ledebouria revoluta, photographed by Shaun Swanepoel — fig. d Shaun Swanepoel, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 159255551

Ledebouria revoluta, photographed by Corne Brink — fig. f Corne Brink, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 68800313

Ledebouria revoluta, photographed by Tony Rebelo — fig. g Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 64863764

Ledebouria revoluta, photographed by S.MORE — fig. h S.MORE, CC0 1.0 / obs. 57353947

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 23 botanical countries

Native distribution of Ledebouria revoluta, 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
Angola	ANG	AFRICA
Botswana	BOT
Cape Provinces	CPP
Chad	CHA
Eritrea	ERI
Eswatini	SWZ
Ethiopia	ETH
Free State	OFS
Kenya	KEN
KwaZulu-Natal	NAT
Malawi	MLW
Mozambique	MOZ
Namibia	NAM
Northern Provinces	TVL
Somalia	SOM
Sudan-South Sudan	SUD
Tanzania	TAN
Uganda	UGA
Zambia	ZAM
Zimbabwe	ZIM
India	IND	ASIA-TROPICAL
Sri Lanka	SRL
Yemen	YEM	ASIA-TEMPERATE

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 66 in flower of 177 examined

65%

11%

38%

10%

63%

15%

25%

33%

57%

59%

Proportion of examined Ledebouria revoluta in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	11	17	65%	41% to 83%
Feb	1	9	11%	2% to 44%
Mar	3	8	38%	14% to 69%
Apr	1	10	10%	2% to 40%
May	1	13	8%	1% to 33%
Jun	15	24	63%	43% to 79%
Jul	2	13	15%	4% to 42%
Aug	1	15	7%	1% to 30%
Sep	3	12	25%	9% to 53%
Oct	6	18	33%	16% to 56%
Nov	12	21	57%	37% to 76%
Dec	10	17	59%	36% to 78%

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Ledebouria revoluta 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. 66 of 177 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 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 433 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	5.0 °C	8.4 °C	16.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	23.0 °C	26.3 °C	36.0 °C
Annual rainfall	433 mm	550 mm	1,354 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	4 mm	89 mm	135 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 433 research-grade observations of Ledebouria revoluta 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 38 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.

Barnardia indica Wight
Drimia acuminata G.Lodd.
Drimia bifolia (Hochst. ex A.Rich.) Schweinf.
Drimia brevifolia Baker
Drimia lanceaefolia (Jacq.) Ker Gawl.
Drimia lanceifolia var. longipedunculata Schrad.
Drimia longipedunculata Sweet
Drimia revoluta (L.f.) Sweet
Drimia undulata Jacq. ex Willd.
Eratobotrys bifolius Hochst. ex A.Rich.
Hyacinthus revolutus L.f.
Hypoxis violacea Schult. & Schult.f.
Lachenalia lanceaefolia Jacq.
Lachenalia lanceifolia var. maculata Tratt.
Lachenalia maculata Tratt.
Ledebouria hyacinthina Roth
Ledebouria sickenbergeri (Deflers) Speta
Ledebouria yemenensis (Deflers) Speta
Melanthium hyacinthium B.Heyne ex Roth
Phalangium revolutum (L.f.) Pers.
Phalangium spicatum Poir.
Scilla carnosula van der Merwe
Scilla chiovendae Cufod.
Scilla hyacinthina (Roth) J.F.Macbr.

and 14 more.

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.