Searsia lucida | BotanAI

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Searsia lucida, photographed by Tony Rebelo — fig. a Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-06-04 / obs. 205267137

Searsia lucida, photographed by Justin Ponder — fig. d Justin Ponder, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 193846937

Searsia lucida, photographed by Caroline Voget — fig. h Caroline Voget, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 194411682

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 5 botanical countries

Native distribution of Searsia 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Cape Provinces	CPP	AFRICA
KwaZulu-Natal	NAT
Lesotho	LES
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 436 in flower of 964 examined

14%

61%

74%

52%

24%

Proportion of examined Searsia lucida in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	1	40	3%	0% to 13%
Feb	1	18	6%	1% to 26%
Mar	0	10	0%	0% to 28%
Apr	0	48	0%	0% to 7%
May	0	10	0%	0% to 28%
Jun	0	11	0%	0% to 26%
Jul	5	37	14%	6% to 28%
Aug	80	131	61%	53% to 69%
Sep	213	288	74%	69% to 79%
Oct	113	218	52%	45% to 58%
Nov	22	92	24%	16% to 34%
Dec	1	61	2%	0% to 9%

Peak flowering in Sep. Each bar is the share of Searsia lucida 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. 436 of 964 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 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.

Rhus africana Mill.
Rhus cavanillesii DC.
Rhus dunensis Gand.
Rhus lucida L.
Rhus lucida f. elliptica (Sond.) Moffett
Rhus lucida f. scoparia (Eckl. & Zeyh.) Moffett
Rhus lucida var. elliptica Sond.
Rhus lucida var. outeniquensis Schönland
Rhus outeniquensis Szyszył.
Rhus schlechteri Diels
Rhus scoparia Eckl. & Zeyh.
Searsia africana (Mill.) F.A.Barkley
Toxicodendron africanum (Mill.) Kuntze
Toxicodendron lucidum (L.) Kuntze
Toxicodendron scoparium 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.