Rawsonia lucidaHarv. & Sond.

WFO wfo-0000899604 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 5 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 5 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.

Rawsonia lucida, photographed by Mahomed Desai
fig. a Mahomed Desai, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-04-30 / obs. 192182448
Rawsonia lucida, photographed by Mahomed Desai
fig. b Mahomed Desai, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 192182454
Rawsonia lucida, photographed by Mahomed Desai
fig. c Mahomed Desai, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 136525710
Rawsonia lucida, photographed by Elliot Greiner
fig. d Elliot Greiner, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 201256152
Rawsonia lucida, photographed by Mahomed Desai
fig. e Mahomed Desai, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 136525704
Rawsonia lucida, photographed by Sunčana Bradley
fig. f Sunčana Bradley, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 111509259
Rawsonia lucida, photographed by Sunčana Bradley
fig. g Sunčana Bradley, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 111509271
Rawsonia lucida, photographed by Margaret Burger
fig. h Margaret Burger, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 165130860

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.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Accession
K000614328
Filed as
Rawsonia lucida Harv. & Sond.
Det. by
Darbyshire, I.
Collected
Mphamba 2008-10-25
Origin
MZ
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 18 botanical countries

Regions where Rawsonia lucida is native: Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Cape Provinces, DR Congo, Eswatini, Kenya, KwaZulu-Natal, Malawi, Mozambique, Northern Provinces, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan-South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe AngolaBotswanaBurundiCape ProvincesDR CongoEswatiniKenyaKwaZulu-NatalMalawiMozambiqueNorthern ProvincesRwandaSomaliaSudan-South SudanTanzaniaUgandaZambiaZimbabwe
Native distribution of Rawsonia lucida, 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
Angola ANG AFRICA
Botswana BOT
Burundi BUR
Cape Provinces CPP
DR Congo ZAI
Eswatini SWZ
Kenya KEN
KwaZulu-Natal NAT
Malawi MLW
Mozambique MOZ
Northern Provinces TVL
Rwanda RWA
Somalia SOM
Sudan-South Sudan SUD
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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 134 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 5.7 °C 9.8 °C 14.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 25.0 °C 26.2 °C 29.0 °C
Annual rainfall 799 mm 993 mm 1,219 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 33 mm 97 mm 122 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 134 research-grade observations of Rawsonia lucida 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.

Also published as 8 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.

  • Oncoba spinidens Hiern
  • Rawsonia reticulata Gilg
  • Rawsonia schlechteri Gilg
  • Rawsonia spinidens (Hiern) Mendonça & Sleumer
  • Rawsonia transjubensis Chiov.
  • Rawsonia ugandensis Dawe & Sprague
  • Rawsonia uluguruensis Sleumer
  • Rawsonia usambarensis Engl. & Gilg

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.