In 1848 Carl Heinrich 'Bipontinus' Schultz described Schnittspahnia rueppellii, which he assigned to the Annonaceae, based on a specimen that was collected by Eduard Rüppell and Georg Wilhelm Schimper, from high elevations in the Semien Mountains in Ethiopia, and now reside in the Kew herbarium. Georg Carl Wilhelm Vatke realised this plant belonged to the Asteraceae, and renamed it to Landtia rueppellii in 1875. Karl August Otto Hoffmann thought the species should be assigned to the genus Arctotis, creating the new combination A. rueppellii in 1895. A plant collected by Ernest Edward Galpin on Mount Kinangop in the southern Aberdare Range of Kenya, and also kept at Kew, was regarded different enough by the very young John Hutchinson, who named it Landtia lobulata in 1914. Gustave Beauverd merged the genus Landtia with Haplocarpha, and created the new combination H. rueppellii in 1915. Later, in 1930, Hutchinson and Marion Beatrice Moss described a plant collected by Arthur Disbrowe Cotton on Mount Kilimanjaro, since stored at Kew, naming it Landtia kilimanjarica. All of these names are now regarded synonymous.