Searsia discolor

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Searsia discolor, photographed by Tony Rebelo — fig. b Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 180211602

Searsia discolor, photographed by Matthew Fainman — fig. h Matthew Fainman, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 173997880

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 6 botanical countries

Native distribution of Searsia discolor, 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
Eswatini	SWZ
Free State	OFS
KwaZulu-Natal	NAT
Lesotho	LES
Northern Provinces	TVL

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 173 in flower of 422 examined

40%

12%

55%

82%

85%

Proportion of examined Searsia discolor in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	45	112	40%	32% to 49%
Feb	9	77	12%	6% to 21%
Mar	0	46	0%	0% to 8%
Apr	1	24	4%	1% to 20%
May	1	13	8%	1% to 33%
Jun	1	4	too few examined
Jul	0	4	too few examined
Aug	0	0	too few examined
Sep	1	1	too few examined
Oct	6	11	55%	28% to 79%
Nov	42	51	82%	70% to 90%
Dec	67	79	85%	75% to 91%

Peak flowering in Dec. Each bar is the share of Searsia discolor 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. 173 of 422 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 4 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 11 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.

Rhus discolor E.Mey. ex Sond.
Rhus discolor f. grandifolia Schönland
Rhus discolor f. latifolia Schönland
Rhus discolor f. villosissima Schönland
Rhus discolor var. villosissima Burtt Davy
Rhus grandifolia Engl.
Rhus rufescens Eckl. & Zeyh.
Rhus villosissima Engl.
Toxicodendron discolor Kuntze
Toxicodendron grandifolium (Engl.) Kuntze
Toxicodendron villosissimum (Engl.) 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.