Schizocarphus nervosus

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Schizocarphus nervosus, photographed by Matthew Fainman — fig. d Matthew Fainman, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 172505883

Schizocarphus nervosus, photographed by grabbarg — fig. f grabbarg, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 165937849

Schizocarphus nervosus, photographed by Antoinette Eyssell Knox — fig. g Antoinette Eyssell Knox, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 114560885

Schizocarphus nervosus, photographed by James Deacon — fig. h James Deacon, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 116768630

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 14 botanical countries

Native distribution of Schizocarphus nervosus, 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
Malawi	MLW
Mozambique	MOZ
Namibia	NAM
Northern Provinces	TVL
Rwanda	RWA
Tanzania	TAN
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 58 in flower of 82 examined

88%

57%

13%

88%

85%

Proportion of examined Schizocarphus nervosus in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	14	16	88%	64% to 97%
Feb	4	7	57%	25% to 84%
Mar	1	8	13%	2% to 47%
Apr	0	4	too few examined
May	0	0	too few examined
Jun	0	0	too few examined
Jul	0	0	too few examined
Aug	0	0	too few examined
Sep	0	0	too few examined
Oct	2	4	too few examined
Nov	15	17	88%	66% to 97%
Dec	22	26	85%	66% to 94%

Peak flowering in Nov. Each bar is the share of Schizocarphus nervosus 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. 58 of 82 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 7 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 813 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-1.4 °C	2.8 °C	12.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	20.7 °C	24.5 °C	28.6 °C
Annual rainfall	600 mm	946 mm	1,221 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	15 mm	43 mm	129 mm

It is found where winters bring light frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 813 research-grade observations of Schizocarphus nervosus 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 23 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.

Drimia dregeana Kunth
Ornithogalum nervosum Burch.
Schizocarphus acerosus (van der Merwe) van der Merwe
Schizocarphus gerrardii (Baker) van der Merwe
Schizocarphus hispidulus (Baker) Speta
Schizocarphus rigidifolius (Kunth) van der Merwe
Schizocarphus setiferus (Baker) Speta
Scilla bakeriana Poelln.
Scilla eriospermoides Engl. & Gilg
Scilla gerrardii Baker
Scilla hispidula Baker
Scilla nervosa (Burch.) J.P.Jessop
Scilla pallidiflora Baker
Scilla pubescens Baker
Scilla rigidifolia Baker
Scilla rigidifolia Kunth
Scilla rigidifolia var. acerosa Hedw.
Scilla rigidifolia var. gerrardii (Baker) Baker
Scilla rigidifolia var. nervosa van der Merwe
Scilla rigidifolia var. nervosa (Burch.) Baker
Scilla setifera Baker
Scilla versicolor Baker
Urginea bragae Engl.

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.