Rotheca hirsuta

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Rotheca hirsuta, photographed by Suvarna Parbhoo Mohan — fig. b Suvarna Parbhoo Mohan, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 165169254

Rotheca hirsuta, photographed by Peter Warren — fig. c Peter Warren, CC0 1.0 / obs. 165973208

Rotheca hirsuta, photographed by Mahomed Desai — fig. d Mahomed Desai, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 102499609

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 10 botanical countries

Native distribution of Rotheca hirsuta, 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
Botswana	BOT
Cape Provinces	CPP
Eswatini	SWZ
Free State	OFS
KwaZulu-Natal	NAT
Lesotho	LES
Mozambique	MOZ
Northern Provinces	TVL
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 54 in flower of 56 examined

100%

92%

Proportion of examined Rotheca hirsuta in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	4	4	too few examined
Feb	1	1	too few examined
Mar	2	2	too few examined
Apr	0	0	too few examined
May	0	0	too few examined
Jun	0	0	too few examined
Jul	1	1	too few examined
Aug	0	0	too few examined
Sep	8	8	100%	68% to 100%
Oct	25	25	100%	87% to 100%
Nov	11	12	92%	65% to 99%
Dec	2	3	too few examined

Peak flowering in Sep. Each bar is the share of Rotheca hirsuta 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. 54 of 56 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 9 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 13 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.

Amerina triphylla (Hochst.) DC.
Clerodendrum hirsutum (Hochst.) H.Pearson
Clerodendrum hirsutum var. ciliatum H.Pearson
Clerodendrum natalense Gürke
Clerodendrum pearsonii Moldenke
Clerodendrum triphyllum (Hochst.) H.Pearson
Clerodendrum triphyllum f. angustissimum Moldenke
Clerodendrum triphyllum f. hirsutum (Hochst.) R.Fern.
Clerodendrum triphyllum var. ciliatum (H.Pearson) Moldenke
Clerodendrum triphyllum var. vernum B.Thomas
Cyclonema hirsutum Hochst.
Cyclonema triphyllum (Hochst.) Harv.
Siphonanthus triphyllus (Hochst.) Hiern ex S.Moore

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.