Lobelia flaccida(C.Presl) A.DC.

WFO wfo-0000815524 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Lobelia flaccida, photographed by Tony Rebelo
fig. a Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-02-11 / obs. 180193239
Lobelia flaccida, photographed by Tony Rebelo
fig. b Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 180206495
Lobelia flaccida, photographed by Tony Rebelo
fig. c Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 180116986
Lobelia flaccida, photographed by Tony Rebelo
fig. d Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 180115179
Lobelia flaccida, photographed by Tony Rebelo
fig. e Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 179756715
Lobelia flaccida, photographed by Tony Rebelo
fig. f Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 180117474
Lobelia flaccida, photographed by Tony Rebelo
fig. g Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 179980403
Lobelia flaccida, photographed by Tony Rebelo
fig. h Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 179578036

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 11 botanical countries

Regions where Lobelia flaccida is native: Cape Provinces, Eswatini, Free State, Kenya, KwaZulu-Natal, Lesotho, Mozambique, Northern Provinces, Sudan-South Sudan, Uganda, Zimbabwe Cape ProvincesEswatiniFree StateKenyaKwaZulu-NatalLesothoMozambiqueNorthern ProvincesSudan-South SudanUgandaZimbabwe
Native distribution of Lobelia flaccida, 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
Cape Provinces CPP AFRICA
Eswatini SWZ
Free State OFS
Kenya KEN
KwaZulu-Natal NAT
Lesotho LES
Mozambique MOZ
Northern Provinces TVL
Sudan-South Sudan SUD
Uganda UGA
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 91 in flower of 92 examined

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Lobelia flaccida 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. 91 of 92 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 4 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 525 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -3.1 °C 4.1 °C 12.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 20.1 °C 24.2 °C 28.2 °C
Annual rainfall 639 mm 942 mm 1,224 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 24 mm 62 mm 135 mm

It is found where winters bring light frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 525 research-grade observations of Lobelia flaccida 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 26 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.

  • Lobelia anceps f. ugandensis E.Wimm.
  • Lobelia bellidifolia f. flexuosa Zahlbr.
  • Lobelia bellidifolia f. stricta Zahlbr.
  • Lobelia bellidifolia var. brevidens (C.Presl) A.DC.
  • Lobelia bellidifolia var. glabrata C.Presl ex A.DC.
  • Lobelia bellidifolia var. hirsuta C.Presl ex A.DC.
  • Lobelia filiformis var. krebsiana E.Wimm.
  • Lobelia filiformis var. rusticana E.Wimm.
  • Lobelia flaccida var. afra E.Wimm.
  • Lobelia flaccida var. densifoliata E.Wimm.
  • Lobelia flaccida var. hirsuta (C.Presl ex A.DC.) E.Wimm.
  • Lobelia flaccida var. laxifoliata E.Wimm.
  • Lobelia flaccida var. scabripes (C.Presl) E.Wimm.
  • Lobelia flaccida var. stricta (Zahlbr.) E.Wimm.
  • Lobelia granvikii T.C.E.Fr.
  • Lobelia knysnensis Schltr.
  • Lobelia krebsiana A.DC.
  • Lobelia melleri var. grossidens E.Wimm.
  • Lobelia mossiana R.D.Good
  • Lobelia orbiculata E.Wimm.
  • Lobelia orbiculata f. subcuneata E.Wimm.
  • Lobelia scabripes (C.Presl) A.DC.
  • Lobelia senegalensis var. subaspera E.Wimm.
  • Rapuntium bellidifolium var. brevidens C.Presl

and 2 more.

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.