Tephrosia noctiflora (South African hoarypea)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Tephrosia noctiflora, photographed by 葉子 — fig. a 葉子, CC0 1.0 / 2022-02-26 / obs. 184799615

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 12 botanical countries

Native distribution of Tephrosia noctiflora, 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. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Comoros	COM	AFRICA
DR Congo	ZAI
Kenya	KEN
Madagascar	MDG
Malawi	MLW
Mozambique	MOZ
Northern Provinces	TVL
Somalia	SOM
Tanzania	TAN
Zimbabwe	ZIM
India	IND	ASIA-TROPICAL
Brazil Northeast	BZE	SOUTHERN AMERICA

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 40 in flower of 46 examined

100%

80%

75%

Proportion of examined Tephrosia noctiflora in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	5	5	100%	57% to 100%
Feb	3	3	too few examined
Mar	3	3	too few examined
Apr	3	4	too few examined
May	6	6	100%	61% to 100%
Jun	5	5	100%	57% to 100%
Jul	2	3	too few examined
Aug	0	0	too few examined
Sep	4	5	80%	38% to 96%
Oct	2	3	too few examined
Nov	1	1	too few examined
Dec	6	8	75%	41% to 93%

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Tephrosia noctiflora 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. 40 of 46 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.

Also published as 7 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.

Cracca noctiflora (Bojer ex Baker) Kuntze
Tephrosia amoena Baker
Tephrosia hirta Bojer
Tephrosia hookeriana sensu Baker
Tephrosia hookeriana var. amoena Prain
Tephrosia subamoena Prain
Tephrosia subamoena J.R.Drumm. & Hemsl.

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.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.