Senecio pterophorus

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Senecio pterophorus, photographed by Tony Rebelo — fig. d Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 193791429

Senecio pterophorus, photographed by Tim Kirsten — fig. f Tim Kirsten, CC0 1.0 / obs. 192455979

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 Senecio pterophorus, 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
KwaZulu-Natal	NAT
Lesotho	LES
Mozambique	MOZ

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 383 in flower of 637 examined

78%

63%

71%

59%

45%

37%

27%

16%

26%

49%

77%

91%

Proportion of examined Senecio pterophorus in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	47	60	78%	66% to 87%
Feb	17	27	63%	44% to 78%
Mar	20	28	71%	53% to 85%
Apr	35	59	59%	47% to 71%
May	30	66	45%	34% to 57%
Jun	15	41	37%	24% to 52%
Jul	3	11	27%	10% to 57%
Aug	5	32	16%	7% to 32%
Sep	11	43	26%	15% to 40%
Oct	36	74	49%	38% to 60%
Nov	80	104	77%	68% to 84%
Dec	84	92	91%	84% to 96%

Peak flowering in Dec. Each bar is the share of Senecio pterophorus 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. 383 of 637 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 1 synonym

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.

Senecio pterophorus var. apterus Harv.

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.