Aconitum vulparia (wolfsbane)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Aconitum vulparia, photographed by Ljaž — fig. a Ljaž, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-09-04 / obs. 155132452

Aconitum vulparia, photographed by Fabien Piednoir — fig. b Fabien Piednoir, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 24405490

Aconitum vulparia, photographed by José Luis Camaño — fig. c José Luis Camaño, CC0 1.0 / obs. 150500746

Aconitum vulparia, photographed by Tobias Schönberg — fig. d Tobias Schönberg, CC0 1.0 / obs. 203899769

Aconitum vulparia, photographed by Étienne Léveillé-Bourret — fig. e Étienne Léveillé-Bourret, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 44831028

Aconitum vulparia, photographed by Johannes Schlagbauer — fig. f Johannes Schlagbauer, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 19746174

Aconitum vulparia, photographed by Jason Grant — fig. g Jason Grant, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 4546227

Aconitum vulparia, photographed by Chris Vynbos — fig. h Chris Vynbos, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 31102995

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.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium: Smithsonian, US National Herbarium
Accession: US 1346564
Filed as: Aconitum vulparia Rchb.
Det. by: not recorded on this sheet
Collected: G. Sirjaev 1924-06
Origin: CZ
The sheet: View the digitised specimen (CC0 1.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 12 botanical countries

Native distribution of Aconitum vulparia, 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
Austria	AUT	EUROPE
Belgium	BGM
Bulgaria	BUL
Czechia-Slovakia	CZE
France	FRA
Germany	GER
Italy	ITA
Netherlands	NET
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Romania	ROM
Spain	SPA
Switzerland	SWI

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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 337 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-13.5 °C	-5.1 °C	0.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	15.6 °C	20.4 °C	25.6 °C
Annual rainfall	659 mm	1,201 mm	2,127 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	101 mm	183 mm	379 mm

It is found where winters bring hard frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 337 research-grade observations of Aconitum vulparia 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.

Also published as 30 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 beckianum Gáyer
Aconitum croaticum Degen & Gáyer
Aconitum gracilescens Gáyer
Aconitum lasiostomum f. velutinum Rchb.
Aconitum lycoctonum subsp. vulparia (Rchb.) Nyman
Aconitum lycoctonum var. cynoctonum (Rchb.) Regel
Aconitum lycoctonum var. penninum Ser.
Aconitum lycoctonum var. puberulum Ser.
Aconitum lycoctonum var. thalianum Wallr.
Aconitum lycoctonum var. vulparia (Rchb.) Regel
Aconitum pauciflorum Host
Aconitum penninum (Ser.) Gáyer
Aconitum puberulum Hayek
Aconitum thalianum (Wallr.) Gáyer
Aconitum tragoctonum Rchb.
Aconitum velebiticum Degen ex Gáyer
Aconitum velutinum (Rchb.) Grinț.
Aconitum vulparia f. adenocarpum Gáyer
Aconitum vulparia f. adenosepalum Gáyer
Aconitum vulparia f. beckianum Gáyer
Aconitum vulparia f. monauense (Schmidt) Gáyer
Aconitum vulparia f. myoctonum (Rchb.) Gáyer
Aconitum vulparia f. praecox (A.Kern.) Gáyer
Aconitum vulparia f. tragoctonum Rchb.

and 6 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.
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.