Argemone mexicanaL.

Mexican prickly poppy

WFO wfo-0000547034 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Argemone mexicana, photographed by José Gerardo Velasco
fig. a José Gerardo Velasco, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-04-29 / obs. 193527434
Argemone mexicana, photographed by Center for Urban Ecology
fig. b Center for Urban Ecology, CC0 1.0 / obs. 186726754
Argemone mexicana, photographed by juniem
fig. c juniem, CC0 1.0 / obs. 201352101
Argemone mexicana, photographed by Center for Urban Ecology
fig. d Center for Urban Ecology, CC0 1.0 / obs. 187939597
Argemone mexicana, photographed by 葉子
fig. e 葉子, CC0 1.0 / obs. 199974202
Argemone mexicana, photographed by Center for Urban Ecology
fig. f Center for Urban Ecology, CC0 1.0 / obs. 185238635
Argemone mexicana, photographed by Rajanna
fig. g Rajanna, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 188750859
Argemone mexicana, photographed by Rodolfo Salinas Villarreal
fig. h Rodolfo Salinas Villarreal, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 185351501

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.

Flowering n = 1,330 observations

Peak flowering in Apr, from 1,330 community-annotated observations worldwide. This is a global aggregate, not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres, and citizen-science records cluster near cities, at weekends, and in spring. Where a species has fewer than 30 annotated records we do not draw this chart at all.

Also published as 20 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.

  • Argemone alba Raf.
  • Argemone alba var. leiocarpa Fedde
  • Argemone leiocarpa Greene
  • Argemone leiocarpa var. mexicanoides Fedde
  • Argemone leiocarpa var. ochroleucoides Fedde
  • Argemone mexicana f. leiocarpa (Greene) Ownbey
  • Argemone mexicana var. anacanthoidea Fedde
  • Argemone mexicana var. lutea Kuntze
  • Argemone mexicana var. mexicana
  • Argemone mexicana var. ochroleuca Britton
  • Argemone mexicana var. parviflora Kuntze
  • Argemone mucronata Dum.Cours. ex Steud.
  • Argemone sexvalvis Stokes
  • Argemone spinosa Gaterau
  • Argemone spinosa Moench
  • Argemone versicolor Salisb.
  • Argemone vulgaris Spach
  • Echtrus mexicanus (L.) Nieuwl.
  • Echtrus trivialis Lour.
  • Papaver mexicanum (L.) E.H.L.Krause

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.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice, no toxicity claim and no native range, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.