Amaranthus blitum (least amaranth)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Amaranthus blitum, photographed by Caleb Catto — fig. a Caleb Catto, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-23 / obs. 200478331

Amaranthus blitum, photographed by Saryu Mae 前朝琉 — fig. b Saryu Mae 前朝琉, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 186351001

Amaranthus blitum, photographed by 葉子 — fig. c 葉子, CC0 1.0 / obs. 184807173

Amaranthus blitum, photographed by Joe Dillon — fig. e Joe Dillon, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 174997892

Amaranthus blitum, photographed by Agnes Trekker — fig. h Agnes Trekker, CC0 1.0 / obs. 156575268

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

Native distribution of Amaranthus blitum, 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
Argentina Northeast	AGE	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Argentina Northwest	AGW
Bolivia	BOL
Brazil Northeast	BZE
Brazil South	BZS
Brazil Southeast	BZL
Brazil West-Central	BZC
Chile North	CLN
Paraguay	PAR
Peru	PER
Uruguay	URU

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 49 in flower of 104 examined

40%

69%

43%

29%

Proportion of examined Amaranthus blitum in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	3	3	too few examined
Feb	2	3	too few examined
Mar	2	5	40%	12% to 77%
Apr	2	4	too few examined
May	1	3	too few examined
Jun	2	4	too few examined
Jul	11	16	69%	44% to 86%
Aug	9	21	43%	24% to 63%
Sep	13	30	43%	27% to 61%
Oct	2	7	29%	8% to 64%
Nov	0	1	too few examined
Dec	2	7	29%	8% to 64%

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Amaranthus blitum 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. 49 of 104 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 6 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 1,678 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-9.9 °C	-1.4 °C	14.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	21.7 °C	26.5 °C	31.6 °C
Annual rainfall	536 mm	989 mm	2,379 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	24 mm	155 mm	291 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 1,678 research-grade observations of Amaranthus blitum 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 65 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.

Albersia arenaria Schur
Albersia ascendens Fourr.
Albersia blitum (L.) Kunth
Albersia blitum var. oleraceus (L.) Hook.f.
Albersia emarginata Asch. ex Hausskn.
Albersia livida Kunth
Albersia oleracea (L.) Kunth
Amaranthus albus Rodsch. ex F.Dietr.
Amaranthus alius E.H.L.Krause
Amaranthus ascendens Loisel.
Amaranthus ascendens subsp. polygonoides (Moq.) Thell. ex Priszter
Amaranthus ascendens var. oleraceus (L.) Thell. ex Priszter
Amaranthus ascendens var. polygonoides (Moq.) Thell.
Amaranthus berchtoldii Seidl ex Opiz
Amaranthus blitonius St.-Lag.
Amaranthus blitum subsp. polygonoides (Moq.) Carretero
Amaranthus blitum var. ascendens (Loisel.) DC.
Amaranthus blitum var. blitum
Amaranthus blitum var. emarginatus (Salzm. ex Uline & W.L.Bray) Lambinon
Amaranthus blitum var. oleraceus (L.) Hook.f.
Amaranthus blitum var. polygonoides Moq.
Amaranthus circinnatus Hort Paris. ex Poir.
Amaranthus diffusus Dulac
Amaranthus emarginatus Salzm. ex Moq.

and 41 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.