Vachellia karroo (karroothorn)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Vachellia karroo, photographed by Mahomed Desai — fig. a Mahomed Desai, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-08 / obs. 205736248

Vachellia karroo, photographed by Tony Rebelo — fig. b Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 194297725

Vachellia karroo, photographed by Shaun Swanepoel — fig. c Shaun Swanepoel, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 193233643

Vachellia karroo, photographed by Dave Richardson — fig. d Dave Richardson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 190886451

Vachellia karroo, photographed by Karen Eichholz — fig. e Karen Eichholz, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 187501664

Vachellia karroo, photographed by Nicola van Berkel — fig. f Nicola van Berkel, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 187361649

Vachellia karroo, photographed by Steven Bodzin — fig. h Steven Bodzin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 180957493

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 Vachellia karroo, 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
Caprivi Strip	CPV
Eswatini	SWZ
Free State	OFS
KwaZulu-Natal	NAT
Lesotho	LES
Malawi	MLW
Mozambique	MOZ
Namibia	NAM
Northern Provinces	TVL
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 2,140 in flower of 4,169 examined

94%

59%

42%

21%

30%

48%

94%

Proportion of examined Vachellia karroo in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	1108	1182	94%	92% to 95%
Feb	134	226	59%	53% to 65%
Mar	124	296	42%	36% to 48%
Apr	8	494	2%	1% to 3%
May	11	687	2%	1% to 3%
Jun	11	191	6%	3% to 10%
Jul	6	123	5%	2% to 10%
Aug	3	71	4%	1% to 12%
Sep	6	29	21%	10% to 38%
Oct	18	60	30%	20% to 43%
Nov	52	108	48%	39% to 57%
Dec	659	702	94%	92% to 95%

Peak flowering in Dec. Each bar is the share of Vachellia karroo 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. 2,140 of 4,169 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 12 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.

Acacia capensis (Burm.f.) Burch.
Acacia dekindtiana A.Chev.
Acacia hirtella E.Mey.
Acacia hirtella var. inermis Walp.
Acacia horrida var. transvaalensis Burtt Davy
Acacia inconflagrabilis Gerstner
Acacia karoo Hayne
Acacia karroo Hayne
Acacia karroo var. transvaalensis (Burtt Davy) Burtt Davy
Acacia reticulata (L.) Willd.
Mimosa capensis Burm.f.
Mimosa reticulata L.

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.
USDA PLANTS Database. common name, checklist symbol VAKA. public domain. 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.