Pelargonium longicauleJacq.

WFO wfo-0001064282 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 6 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 6 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Pelargonium longicaule, photographed by Tony Rebelo
fig. a Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2016-10-02 / obs. 15855264

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

Regions where Pelargonium longicaule is native: Cape Provinces Cape Provinces
Native distribution of Pelargonium longicaule, 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

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 163 in flower of 163 examined

Proportion of examined Pelargonium longicaule in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 13 13 100% 77% to 100%
Feb 3 3 too few examined
Mar 1 1 too few examined
Apr 5 5 100% 57% to 100%
May 1 1 too few examined
Jun 2 2 too few examined
Jul 0 0 too few examined
Aug 5 5 100% 57% to 100%
Sep 19 19 100% 83% to 100%
Oct 46 46 100% 92% to 100%
Nov 42 42 100% 92% to 100%
Dec 26 26 100% 87% to 100%

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Pelargonium longicaule 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. 163 of 163 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 5 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 143 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 5.1 °C 10.4 °C 13.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 19.2 °C 20.1 °C 27.3 °C
Annual rainfall 521 mm 1,007 mm 1,591 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 59 mm 94 mm 146 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 143 research-grade observations of Pelargonium longicaule 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 4 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.

  • Geranium longicaule Thunb.
  • Jenkinsonia longicaulis Hoffmanns.
  • Myrrhidium longicaule Eckl. & Zeyh.
  • Pelargonium myrrhifolium var. fruticosum Harv.

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.