Aconitum lycoctonum (monkshood)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Aconitum lycoctonum, photographed by Harrison J Elkins — fig. a Harrison J Elkins, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-10-09 / obs. 168834202

Aconitum lycoctonum, photographed by Ljaž — fig. b Ljaž, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 153507081

Aconitum lycoctonum, photographed by Attila Oláh — fig. c Attila Oláh, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 155218241

Aconitum lycoctonum, photographed by Norrland — fig. e Norrland, CC0 1.0 / obs. 150258515

Aconitum lycoctonum, photographed by Marco Mussita — fig. f Marco Mussita, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 147531258

Aconitum lycoctonum, photographed by Pavel Kacl — fig. g Pavel Kacl, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 146546681

Aconitum lycoctonum, photographed by Thomas Koffel — fig. h Thomas Koffel, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 146437983

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 10 botanical countries

Native distribution of Aconitum lycoctonum, 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
Belarus	BLR	EUROPE
Central European Russia	RUC
Czechia-Slovakia	CZE
East European Russia	RUE
Germany	GER
North European Russia	RUN
Northwest European Russia	RUW
Poland	POL
South European Russia	RUS
Ukraine	UKR

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 315 in flower of 349 examined

47%

87%

95%

98%

100%

Proportion of examined Aconitum lycoctonum in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	0	too few examined
Feb	0	0	too few examined
Mar	0	2	too few examined
Apr	0	4	too few examined
May	8	17	47%	26% to 69%
Jun	45	52	87%	75% to 93%
Jul	146	154	95%	90% to 97%
Aug	103	105	98%	93% to 99%
Sep	12	12	100%	76% to 100%
Oct	1	3	too few examined
Nov	0	0	too few examined
Dec	0	0	too few examined

Peak flowering in Sep. Each bar is the share of Aconitum lycoctonum 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. 315 of 349 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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 1,864 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-15.2 °C	-8.2 °C	-2.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	14.4 °C	19.4 °C	24.0 °C
Annual rainfall	707 mm	1,463 mm	2,330 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	112 mm	244 mm	455 mm

It is found where winters are severely cold. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,864 research-grade observations of Aconitum lycoctonum that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 46 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.

Aconitum aegophonum Rchb.
Aconitum alienum Rchb.
Aconitum altissimum Mill.
Aconitum altissimum subsp. penninum (Ser.) Holub
Aconitum arctophonum Rchb.
Aconitum australe Rchb.
Aconitum boreale Ser. ex Rchb.
Aconitum cynoctonum Rchb.
Aconitum dissectum Tausch ex Rchb.
Aconitum excelsum Turcz.
Aconitum galectonum Rchb.
Aconitum galeriflorum Stokes
Aconitum intermedium Host
Aconitum jacquinianum Host
Aconitum lagoctonum Rchb.
Aconitum luparia Rchb.
Aconitum lupicida Rchb.
Aconitum lycoctonum subsp. lycoctonum
Aconitum lycoctonum var. myoctonum (Rchb.) Regel
Aconitum lycoctonum var. septentrionale Regel
Aconitum meloctonum Rchb.
Aconitum monanense Schmidt ex Rchb.
Aconitum myoctonum Rchb.
Aconitum ochroleucum hort. ex Steud.

and 22 more.

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 ACLY. 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.