Chaerophyllum procumbens(L.) Crantz

spreading chervil

WFO wfo-0000599071 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Chaerophyllum procumbens, photographed by Alby Penney
fig. a Alby Penney, CC0 1.0 / 2022-04-30 / obs. 197823803

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 27 botanical countries

Regions where Chaerophyllum procumbens is native: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, District of Columbia, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Ontario, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin AlabamaArkansasGeorgiaIllinoisIndianaIowaKansasKentuckyMarylandMichiganMississippiMissouriNebraskaNew JerseyNew YorkNorth CarolinaOhioOklahomaOntarioPennsylvaniaSouth CarolinaTennesseeVirginiaWest VirginiaWisconsin DelawareDistrict of Columbia
Native distribution of Chaerophyllum procumbens, 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
Alabama ALA NORTHERN AMERICA
Arkansas ARK
Delaware DEL
District of Columbia WDC
Georgia GEO
Illinois ILL
Indiana INI
Iowa IOW
Kansas KAN
Kentucky KTY
Maryland MRY
Michigan MIC
Mississippi MSI
Missouri MSO
Nebraska NEB
New Jersey NWJ
New York NWY
North Carolina NCA
Ohio OHI
Oklahoma OKL
Ontario ONT
Pennsylvania PEN
South Carolina SCA
Tennessee TEN
Virginia VRG
West Virginia WVA
Wisconsin WIS

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 44 in flower of 58 examined

Proportion of examined Chaerophyllum procumbens in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 0 too few examined
Feb 0 1 too few examined
Mar 3 5 60% 23% to 88%
Apr 37 44 84% 71% to 92%
May 4 7 57% 25% to 84%
Jun 0 1 too few examined
Jul 0 0 too few examined
Aug 0 0 too few examined
Sep 0 0 too few examined
Oct 0 0 too few examined
Nov 0 0 too few examined
Dec 0 0 too few examined

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Chaerophyllum procumbens 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. 44 of 58 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 9 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 613 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -9.5 °C -4.8 °C 1.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 27.4 °C 29.3 °C 32.0 °C
Annual rainfall 893 mm 1,081 mm 1,309 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 101 mm 216 mm 269 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 613 research-grade observations of Chaerophyllum procumbens 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 9 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.

  • Chaerophyllum articulatum Bosc ex DC.
  • Chaerophyllum bifidum Willd. ex DC.
  • Chaerophyllum boscii Steud.
  • Chaerophyllum procumbens var. boscii DC.
  • Chaerophyllum procumbens var. tainturieri (Hook.) J.M.Coult. & Rose
  • Chaerophyllum shortii Bush
  • Myrrhis bifida Spreng.
  • Myrrhis procumbens (L.) Spreng.
  • Scandix procumbens L.

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.