Cistus monspeliensis (Montpelier cistus)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Cistus monspeliensis, photographed by Mehdi Chetibi — fig. a Mehdi Chetibi, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-03 / obs. 203061260

Cistus monspeliensis, photographed by Alessia Guggisberg — fig. b Alessia Guggisberg, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 201696952

Cistus monspeliensis, photographed by Santiago Martín-Bravo — fig. c Santiago Martín-Bravo, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 200353301

Cistus monspeliensis, photographed by Jacqueline Jeanne — fig. d Jacqueline Jeanne, CC0 1.0 / obs. 201790916

Cistus monspeliensis, photographed by carnifex — fig. e carnifex, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 199343273

Cistus monspeliensis, photographed by Christian Berg — fig. f Christian Berg, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 198320608

Cistus monspeliensis, photographed by Paulo Martins — fig. g Paulo Martins, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 195642719

Cistus monspeliensis, photographed by Duarte Frade — fig. h Duarte Frade, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 195620217

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 18 botanical countries

Native distribution of Cistus monspeliensis, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Baleares	BAL	EUROPE
Corse	COR
France	FRA
Greece	GRC
Italy	ITA
Kriti	KRI
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Portugal	POR
Sardegna	SAR
Sicilia	SIC
Spain	SPA
Algeria	ALG	AFRICA
Canary Is.	CNY
Madeira	MDR
Morocco	MOR
Tunisia	TUN
Cyprus	CYP	ASIA-TEMPERATE
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 488 in flower of 737 examined

55%

65%

62%

89%

91%

50%

10%

41%

Proportion of examined Cistus monspeliensis in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	16	29	55%	38% to 72%
Feb	31	48	65%	50% to 77%
Mar	48	77	62%	51% to 72%
Apr	185	207	89%	84% to 93%
May	167	183	91%	86% to 95%
Jun	24	48	50%	36% to 64%
Jul	3	29	10%	4% to 26%
Aug	0	15	0%	0% to 20%
Sep	0	22	0%	0% to 15%
Oct	0	28	0%	0% to 12%
Nov	2	22	9%	3% to 28%
Dec	12	29	41%	26% to 59%

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Cistus monspeliensis 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. 488 of 737 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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 1,925 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	1.7 °C	6.6 °C	12.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	22.7 °C	27.1 °C	32.7 °C
Annual rainfall	448 mm	679 mm	976 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	10 mm	52 mm	141 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 1,925 research-grade observations of Cistus monspeliensis 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 21 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 affinis Bertol. ex Guss.
Cistus collinus Salisb.
Cistus feredjensis Batt.
Cistus monspeliensis f. albiflorus Briq.
Cistus monspeliensis f. flavescens Briq.
Cistus monspeliensis f. typicus Dans.
Cistus monspeliensis prol. affinis (Bertol. ex Guss.) Rouy & Foucaud
Cistus monspeliensis prol. affinis (Bertol. ex Guss.) Rouy & Foucaud
Cistus monspeliensis subsp. affinis (Bertol. ex Guss.) Sennen
Cistus monspeliensis subsp. canariensis Rivas Mart., Martín Osorio & Wildpret
Cistus monspeliensis var. affinis (Bertol. ex Guss.) P.Fourn.
Cistus monspeliensis var. densifolius Sennen
Cistus monspeliensis var. feredjensis (Batt.) Batt.
Cistus monspeliensis var. flavescens Briq.
Cistus monspeliensis var. major Rouy & Foucaud
Cistus monspeliensis var. minor Willk.
Cistus monspeliensis var. parviflorus Sennen
Cistus monspeliensis var. vulgaris Willk.
Cistus oleifolius Mill.
Cistus valentinus Pourr. ex Nyman
Stephanocarpus monspeliensis (L.) Spach

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