Bryonia albaL.

white bryony

WFO wfo-0000572927 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Bryonia alba, photographed by Daniel S.
fig. a Daniel S., CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-22 / obs. 199899940

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 21 botanical countries

Regions where Bryonia alba is native: Altay, Kazakhstan, Kirgizstan, Türkiye, Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Central European Russia, East European Russia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Krym, NW. Balkan Pen., Poland, Romania, South European Russia, Switzerland, Türkiye-in-Europe, Ukraine AltayKazakhstanKirgizstanTürkiyeAlbaniaAustriaBulgariaCentral European RussiaEast European RussiaGermanyGreeceHungaryItalyKrymNW. Balkan Pen.PolandRomaniaSouth European RussiaSwitzerlandTürkiye-in-EuropeUkraine
Native distribution of Bryonia alba, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Albania ALB EUROPE
Austria AUT
Bulgaria BUL
Central European Russia RUC
East European Russia RUE
Germany GER
Greece GRC
Hungary HUN
Italy ITA
Krym KRY
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Poland POL
Romania ROM
South European Russia RUS
Switzerland SWI
Türkiye-in-Europe TUE
Ukraine UKR
Altay ALT ASIA-TEMPERATE
Kazakhstan KAZ
Kirgizstan KGZ
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 503 in flower of 963 examined

Proportion of examined Bryonia alba in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 6 0% 0% to 39%
Feb 1 2 too few examined
Mar 4 18 22% 9% to 45%
Apr 38 85 45% 35% to 55%
May 123 182 68% 60% to 74%
Jun 144 203 71% 64% to 77%
Jul 96 171 56% 49% to 63%
Aug 49 131 37% 30% to 46%
Sep 31 106 29% 21% to 39%
Oct 12 45 27% 16% to 41%
Nov 5 11 45% 21% to 72%
Dec 0 3 too few examined

Peak flowering in Jun. Each bar is the share of Bryonia alba 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. 503 of 963 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 2 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 1,589 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -14.0 °C -9.4 °C -3.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 22.1 °C 24.3 °C 30.9 °C
Annual rainfall 398 mm 600 mm 1,035 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 54 mm 101 mm 143 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 1,589 research-grade observations of Bryonia alba 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 4 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.

  • Bryonia dioica M.Bieb.
  • Bryonia monoeca E.H.L.Krause
  • Bryonia nigra Gilib.
  • Bryonia vulgaris Gueldenst. ex Ledeb.

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.