The genus Cleretum was established by the English plant taxonomist N.E. Brown in volume 78 (series 3) of The Gardener’s Chronicle in 1925, in an article titled ‘Mesembryanthemum and some new genera separated from it’, however, the meaning of the name is unclear; Cleretum is derived from the Greek kleros, an item used in drawing lots for land in Spartan times, i.e. a pebble, a potsherd or a piece of wood, and the Latin ending –etum, refers to the place dominated by a given plant. The specific name bellidiforme is descriptive of its likeness to flowers of the European daisy genus Bellis, meaning ‘handsome’. The common name bokbaaivygie commemorates the farm Bokbaai (Buck Bay) near Darling on the Cape west coast, where this species occurs commonly, which was owned by the Duckitt family for generations.

The Dutch botanist Nicolaas L. Burmann (1733–1793) initially described this species as Mesembryanthemum bellidiforme in his Prodromus florae capensis, published in Amsterdam in 1768. In 1928, N.E. Brown placed it in the genus Dorotheanthus as D. bellidiformis, a name by which it became very well known, but in 1979, the English botanist Gordon Rowley transferred it to the genus Cleretum, as C. bellidiforme in the horticultural taxonomy journal Baileya. From the early to mid- 20th century, various botanists, primarily Louisa Bolus at the University of Cape Town, described numerous species of Dorotheanthus, including D. acuminatus, D. bidouwensis, D. flos-solis, D. hallii, D. littlewoodii, D. lutens, D. muirii, D. oculatus var. oculatus, D. oculatus var. saldanensis and D. stayneri, however, all these taxa were subsequently regarded as synonyms of D. bellidiformis when the German botanists H.-D. Ihlenfeldt and M. Struck placed Cleretum in synonymy under Dorotheanthus, in 1987. In 2012, the University of Cape Town botanists Cornelia Klak and Peter Bruyns published a molecular phylogeny of the tribe Dorotheantheae (a study of its evolutionary development and diversification, based on DNA analysis) in which it was shown that Dorotheanthus was best placed within the genus Cleretum, thus D. bellidiformis became Cleretum bellidiforme once again; among several other taxonomic changes they made, the purple- or white-flowered Dorotheanthus bellidiformis subsp. hestermalensis from Namaqualand, was renamed Cleretum hestermalense.

Comprising 14 species of succulent annuals, Cleretum is endemic to the western, southwestern and southern winter rainfall parts of South Africa. Its distribution extends from Namaqualand to the southern Cape and inland to the western and southern Great Karoo, and its 2 main centres of diversity are in the Kamiesberg in southcentral Namaqualand and the coastal southwestern part of the Western Cape. Cleretum also includes the genus Aethephyllum, and is the sole member of the tribe Dorotheantheae. Eight of the fourteen species of Cleretum have large, flamboyant flowers, whereas 6 have small, rather insignificant ones; C. bellidiforme is by far the most familiar species and one of the most attractive. In the horticultural trade it is still often referred to as ‘Mesembryanthemum’.