Protea cynaroides (King Protea)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Protea cynaroides, photographed by Tony Rebelo — fig. a Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-05-15 / obs. 198396666

Protea cynaroides, photographed by Tim Kirsten — fig. d Tim Kirsten, CC0 1.0 / obs. 195905139

Protea cynaroides, photographed by Jared Zachary Herman — fig. f Jared Zachary Herman, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 194291510

Protea cynaroides, photographed by Corli du Toit Smith — fig. g Corli du Toit Smith, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 194282281

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 Protea cynaroides, 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 348 in flower of 573 examined

36%

69%

63%

59%

72%

56%

53%

64%

67%

63%

54%

60%

Proportion of examined Protea cynaroides in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	9	25	36%	20% to 55%
Feb	29	42	69%	54% to 81%
Mar	17	27	63%	44% to 78%
Apr	49	83	59%	48% to 69%
May	44	61	72%	60% to 82%
Jun	27	48	56%	42% to 69%
Jul	27	51	53%	40% to 66%
Aug	34	53	64%	51% to 76%
Sep	26	39	67%	51% to 79%
Oct	38	60	63%	51% to 74%
Nov	20	37	54%	38% to 69%
Dec	28	47	60%	45% to 72%

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Protea cynaroides 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. 348 of 573 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.

Also published as 5 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.

Erodendrum cynaraeflorum Knight
Protea cyclophylla (Gand.) Gand. & Schinz
Protea eriolepis (Gand.) Gand. & Schinz
Protea woodwardii Endl.
Scolymocephalus cynarodes Kuntze

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.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.