Protea welwitschii

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Protea welwitschii, photographed by James Deacon — fig. b James Deacon, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 116486774

Protea welwitschii, photographed by Tony Rebelo — fig. f Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 59236809

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 13 botanical countries

Native distribution of Protea welwitschii, 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
Burundi	BUR
DR Congo	ZAI
KwaZulu-Natal	NAT
Lesotho	LES
Malawi	MLW
Mozambique	MOZ
Northern Provinces	TVL
Rwanda	RWA
Tanzania	TAN
Uganda	UGA
Zambia	ZAM
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 63 in flower of 100 examined

80%

75%

71%

20%

14%

90%

Proportion of examined Protea welwitschii in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	24	30	80%	63% to 91%
Feb	9	12	75%	47% to 91%
Mar	1	4	too few examined
Apr	5	7	71%	36% to 92%
May	1	5	20%	4% to 62%
Jun	1	2	too few examined
Jul	0	0	too few examined
Aug	0	2	too few examined
Sep	1	3	too few examined
Oct	1	1	too few examined
Nov	2	14	14%	4% to 40%
Dec	18	20	90%	70% to 97%

Peak flowering in Dec. Each bar is the share of Protea welwitschii 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. 63 of 100 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 6 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.

Also published as 15 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.

Leucadendron welwitschii Hiern
Protea abyssinica var. adolphi-friderici Engl.
Protea congensis Engl.
Protea eickii Engl.
Protea goetzeana Engl.
Protea hirta Klotzsch ex Krauss
Protea hirta subsp. glabrescens Beard
Protea kirkii C.H.Wright
Protea melliodora Engl. & Gilg
Protea myrsinifolia Engl. & Gilg
Protea swynnertonii S.Moore
Protea uhehensis Engl.
Protea welwitschii subsp. glabrescens (Beard) Beard
Protea welwitschii subsp. hirta Beard
Scolymocephalus hirtus (L.) 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.
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.