Adenocarpus complicatus(L.) J.Gay

WFO wfo-0001033772 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 5 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 5 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Adenocarpus complicatus, photographed by Duarte Frade
fig. a Duarte Frade, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-08-14 / obs. 150910028

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 11 botanical countries

Regions where Adenocarpus complicatus is native: Algeria, Madeira, Morocco, Lebanon-Syria, Türkiye, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Sicilia, Spain AlgeriaMoroccoLebanon-SyriaTürkiyeFranceGreeceItalyPortugalSiciliaSpain Madeira
Native distribution of Adenocarpus complicatus, 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. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
France FRA EUROPE
Greece GRC
Italy ITA
Portugal POR
Sicilia SIC
Spain SPA
Algeria ALG AFRICA
Madeira MDR
Morocco MOR
Lebanon-Syria LBS ASIA-TEMPERATE
Türkiye TUR

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 94 in flower of 111 examined

Proportion of examined Adenocarpus complicatus in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 2 too few examined
Feb 0 3 too few examined
Mar 0 1 too few examined
Apr 0 0 too few examined
May 13 15 87% 62% to 96%
Jun 27 27 100% 88% to 100%
Jul 28 30 93% 79% to 98%
Aug 10 12 83% 55% to 95%
Sep 6 7 86% 49% to 97%
Oct 5 5 100% 57% to 100%
Nov 4 6 67% 30% to 90%
Dec 1 3 too few examined

Peak flowering in Jun. Each bar is the share of Adenocarpus complicatus 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. 94 of 111 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 5 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 576 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -3.4 °C -1.3 °C 3.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 23.3 °C 26.2 °C 29.2 °C
Annual rainfall 558 mm 773 mm 1,346 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 63 mm 91 mm 125 mm

It is found where winters bring light 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 576 research-grade observations of Adenocarpus complicatus 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 56 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.

  • Adenocarpus anisochilus subsp. lainzii (Castrov.) Rivas Mart.
  • Adenocarpus aureus (Cav.) Pau
  • Adenocarpus aureus subsp. gibbsianus (Castrov. & Talavera) Rivas Mart. & Cantó
  • Adenocarpus bivonii (C.Presl) C.Presl
  • Adenocarpus bracteatus Font Quer & Pau
  • Adenocarpus brutius Brullo, De Marco & Siracusa
  • Adenocarpus cebennensis Delile ex Soy.-Will.
  • Adenocarpus commutatus var. viciosorum Pau
  • Adenocarpus complicatus subsp. cebennensis (Delile ex Soy.-Will.) Breistr.
  • Adenocarpus complicatus subsp. graecus (Griseb.) Rivas Mart. & Belmonte
  • Adenocarpus complicatus subsp. intermedius (DC.) Cout.
  • Adenocarpus complicatus subsp. parvifolius (Lam.) García Adá, G.López & P.Vargas
  • Adenocarpus complicatus var. barbatus Maire
  • Adenocarpus complicatus var. bracteatus (Font Quer & Pau) Maire
  • Adenocarpus complicatus var. eglandulosa Rivas Goday
  • Adenocarpus complicatus var. glandulosa Rivas Goday
  • Adenocarpus complicatus var. longivillosus Maire
  • Adenocarpus complicatus var. nainii (Maire) Maire
  • Adenocarpus divaricatus (L'Hér.) Boiss.
  • Adenocarpus divaricatus Sweet
  • Adenocarpus divaricatus var. graecus (Griseb.) Boiss.
  • Adenocarpus gibbsianus Castrov. & Talavera
  • Adenocarpus graecus Griseb.
  • Adenocarpus intermedius DC.

and 32 more.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. 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.