Caroxylon imbricatum

Plate 1 figs. a–g · 3 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 3 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.

Caroxylon imbricatum, photographed by S.MORE — fig. a S.MORE, CC0 1.0 / 2019-11-06 / obs. 56763777

Caroxylon imbricatum, photographed by Carrie Seltzer — fig. b Carrie Seltzer, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 5836481

Caroxylon imbricatum, photographed by Arabella Willing — fig. d Arabella Willing, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 111956351

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 29 botanical countries

Native distribution of Caroxylon imbricatum, 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
Algeria	ALG	AFRICA
Central African Republic	CAF
Chad	CHA
Djibouti	DJI
Egypt	EGY
Eritrea	ERI
Libya	LBY
Mali	MLI
Mauritania	MTN
Morocco	MOR
Niger	NGR
Senegal	SEN
Somalia	SOM
Sudan-South Sudan	SUD
Tunisia	TUN
Western Sahara	WSA
Afghanistan	AFG	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Gulf States	GST
Iran	IRN
Iraq	IRQ
Kuwait	KUW
Lebanon-Syria	LBS
Oman	OMA
Palestine	PAL
Saudi Arabia	SAU
Sinai	SIN
Yemen	YEM
India	IND	ASIA-TROPICAL
Pakistan	PAK

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 34 in flower of 79 examined

67%

26%

38%

50%

100%

Proportion of examined Caroxylon imbricatum in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	2	2	too few examined
Feb	3	4	too few examined
Mar	1	2	too few examined
Apr	4	6	67%	30% to 90%
May	1	2	too few examined
Jun	2	3	too few examined
Jul	0	5	0%	0% to 43%
Aug	0	2	too few examined
Sep	7	27	26%	13% to 45%
Oct	5	13	38%	18% to 64%
Nov	4	8	50%	22% to 78%
Dec	5	5	100%	57% to 100%

Peak flowering in Dec. Each bar is the share of Caroxylon imbricatum 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. 34 of 79 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 254 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	5.7 °C	9.4 °C	16.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	35.0 °C	42.0 °C	46.1 °C
Annual rainfall	71 mm	106 mm	171 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	0 mm	0 mm	5 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 254 research-grade observations of Caroxylon imbricatum 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 15 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.

Caroxylon foetidum Moq.
Caroxylon gaetulum (Maire) Akhani & Roalson
Caroxylon imbricatum (Forssk.) Akhani & Roalson
Chenopodium baryosmum Schult.
Salsola baryosma (Schult.) Dandy
Salsola foetida Delile ex Spreng.
Salsola foetida var. gaetula Maire
Salsola foetida var. glabrescens Maire
Salsola foetida var. scopiformis (Maire) Maire
Salsola gaetula (Maire) Botsch.
Salsola imbricata Forssk.
Salsola imbricata subsp. gaetula (Maire) Boulos
Salsola imbricata var. hirtitepala Freitag
Salsola imbricata var. imbricata
Salsola vermiculata var. scopiformis Maire

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.
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.