Cistus creticusL.

hoary rock-rosepink rock-rose

WFO wfo-0000607281 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Cistus creticus, photographed by Emanuele Santarelli
fig. a Emanuele Santarelli, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-06-07 / obs. 205761581

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.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Accession
K000350925
Filed as
Cistus creticus L.
Det. by
Landrein, S.
Collected
coll. ign.
Origin
IT
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 16 botanical countries

Regions where Cistus creticus is native: Morocco, Cyprus, East Aegean Is., Lebanon-Syria, Palestine, Türkiye, Albania, Bulgaria, Corse, Greece, Italy, Kriti, NW. Balkan Pen., Sardegna, Sicilia, Türkiye-in-Europe MoroccoCyprusEast Aegean Is.Lebanon-SyriaPalestineTürkiyeAlbaniaBulgariaCorseGreeceItalyKritiNW. Balkan Pen.SiciliaTürkiye-in-Europe Sardegna
Native distribution of Cistus creticus, 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
Bulgaria BUL
Corse COR
Greece GRC
Italy ITA
Kriti KRI
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Sardegna SAR
Sicilia SIC
Türkiye-in-Europe TUE
Cyprus CYP ASIA-TEMPERATE
East Aegean Is. EAI
Lebanon-Syria LBS
Palestine PAL
Türkiye TUR
Morocco MOR AFRICA

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 855 in flower of 1,049 examined

Proportion of examined Cistus creticus in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 10 26 38% 22% to 57%
Feb 16 29 55% 38% to 72%
Mar 78 98 80% 71% to 86%
Apr 241 254 95% 91% to 97%
May 359 369 97% 95% to 99%
Jun 91 101 90% 83% to 95%
Jul 28 47 60% 45% to 72%
Aug 6 26 23% 11% to 42%
Sep 3 25 12% 4% to 30%
Oct 10 29 34% 20% to 53%
Nov 5 24 21% 9% to 40%
Dec 8 21 38% 21% to 59%

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Cistus creticus 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. 855 of 1,049 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 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.

When it blooms, where you are 1 state

StatePeaksObservations in flower
California Apr 89

Where it actually grows measured, from 1,944 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -0.3 °C 6.2 °C 10.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 22.8 °C 27.3 °C 32.5 °C
Annual rainfall 330 mm 722 mm 1,226 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 3 mm 31 mm 167 mm

It is found where winters bring light 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 1,944 research-grade observations of Cistus creticus 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 54 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.

  • Cistus complicatus Spruner ex Nyman
  • Cistus corsicus Loisel.
  • Cistus creticus f. albus (O.E.Warb.) Demoly
  • Cistus creticus f. flavus Demoly
  • Cistus creticus subsp. corsicus (Loisel.) Greuter & Burdet
  • Cistus creticus var. corsicus (Loisel.) Greuter
  • Cistus creticus var. dalmaticus (H.Lindb.) Greuter
  • Cistus creticus var. jacquinii Willk.
  • Cistus creticus var. morisii Willk.
  • Cistus creticus var. tenorei Willk.
  • Cistus cupanianus C.Presl
  • Cistus dunalianus Sweet
  • Cistus garganicus Ten.
  • Cistus incanus subsp. corsicus (Loisel.) Heywood
  • Cistus incanus subsp. creticus (L.) Heyw.
  • Cistus incanus subsp. creticus (L.) Heywood
  • Cistus incanus subsp. villosus (L.) Murb.
  • Cistus incanus var. corsicus (Loisel.) Gren. & Godr.
  • Cistus incanus var. creticus (L.) Boiss.
  • Cistus incanus var. reichenbachii Hochr.
  • Cistus incanus var. villosus (L.) Murb.
  • Cistus ladaniferus Stokes
  • Cistus philothei Sennen & Mauricio
  • Cistus polymorphus Willk.

and 30 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.