Arisarum vulgareO.Targ.Tozz.

Friar's cowl

WFO wfo-0000275694 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Arisarum vulgare, photographed by Quentin Groom
fig. a Quentin Groom, CC0 1.0 / 2022-05-15 / obs. 197839213

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 22 botanical countries

Regions where Arisarum vulgare is native: Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Cyprus, East Aegean Is., Lebanon-Syria, Palestine, Sinai, Transcaucasus, Türkiye, Albania, Baleares, Corse, France, Greece, Italy, Kriti, NW. Balkan Pen., Sardegna, Sicilia, Spain AlgeriaLibyaMoroccoTunisiaCyprusEast Aegean Is.Lebanon-SyriaPalestineSinaiTranscaucasusTürkiyeAlbaniaCorseFranceGreeceItalyKritiNW. Balkan Pen.SiciliaSpain BalearesSardegna
Native distribution of Arisarum vulgare, 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
Albania ALB EUROPE
Baleares BAL
Corse COR
France FRA
Greece GRC
Italy ITA
Kriti KRI
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Sardegna SAR
Sicilia SIC
Spain SPA
Cyprus CYP ASIA-TEMPERATE
East Aegean Is. EAI
Lebanon-Syria LBS
Palestine PAL
Sinai SIN
Transcaucasus TCS
Türkiye TUR
Algeria ALG AFRICA
Libya LBY
Morocco MOR
Tunisia TUN

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 569 in flower of 665 examined

Proportion of examined Arisarum vulgare in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 104 115 90% 84% to 95%
Feb 89 108 82% 74% to 88%
Mar 93 111 84% 76% to 89%
Apr 35 41 85% 72% to 93%
May 10 17 59% 36% to 78%
Jun 15 15 100% 80% to 100%
Jul 10 10 100% 72% to 100%
Aug 3 3 too few examined
Sep 5 8 63% 31% to 86%
Oct 33 41 80% 66% to 90%
Nov 58 69 84% 74% to 91%
Dec 114 127 90% 83% to 94%

Peak flowering in Jun. Each bar is the share of Arisarum vulgare 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. 569 of 665 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. One month has fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for it. 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 1,995 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 3.0 °C 7.9 °C 11.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 24.1 °C 27.2 °C 32.5 °C
Annual rainfall 394 mm 693 mm 1,180 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 3 mm 43 mm 154 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,995 research-grade observations of Arisarum vulgare 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 28 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.

  • Arisarum arisarum (L.) Huth
  • Arisarum australe Rich.
  • Arisarum azoricum Schott
  • Arisarum balansae Schott
  • Arisarum crassifolium Schott
  • Arisarum forbesii Schott
  • Arisarum hastatum Pomel
  • Arisarum incurvatum Holmboe
  • Arisarum jacquinii Schott
  • Arisarum latifolium Hill
  • Arisarum latifolium Bubani
  • Arisarum libani Schott
  • Arisarum serpentrium Raf.
  • Arisarum sibthorpii Schott
  • Arisarum subalpinum Kotschy ex Engl.
  • Arisarum veslingii Schott
  • Arisarum vulgare subsp. exsertum Maire & Weiller
  • Arisarum vulgare subsp. incurvatum Holmboe
  • Arisarum vulgare subsp. veslingii (Schott) K.Richt.
  • Arisarum vulgare var. veslingii (Schott) Nyman
  • Arum arisarum Lour.
  • Arum arisarum L.
  • Arum calyptrale Salisb.
  • Arum incurvatum Lam.

and 4 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. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. 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.