Cnidium monnieriCusson

Monnier's snowparsley

WFO wfo-0000612807 Accepted WFO 2026-06 6 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–f · 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.

Cnidium monnieri, photographed by 國立臺灣博物館
fig. a 國立臺灣博物館, CC BY 4.0 / 2020-01-24 / obs. 62736833

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 24 botanical countries

Regions where Cnidium monnieri is native: Amur, Buryatiya, China North-Central, China South-Central, China Southeast, Chita, Inner Mongolia, Irkutsk, Japan, Khabarovsk, Korea, Krasnoyarsk, Manchuria, Mongolia, Primorye, Qinghai, Taiwan, Tibet, Yakutiya, Assam, Bangladesh, India, Laos, Vietnam AmurBuryatiyaChina North-CentralChina South-CentralChina SoutheastChitaInner MongoliaIrkutskJapanKhabarovskKrasnoyarskManchuriaMongoliaPrimoryeQinghaiTaiwanTibetYakutiyaAssamBangladeshIndiaLaosVietnam Korea
Native distribution of Cnidium monnieri, 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
Amur AMU ASIA-TEMPERATE
Buryatiya BRY
China North-Central CHN
China South-Central CHC
China Southeast CHS
Chita CTA
Inner Mongolia CHI
Irkutsk IRK
Japan JAP
Khabarovsk KHA
Korea KOR
Krasnoyarsk KRA
Manchuria CHM
Mongolia MON
Primorye PRM
Qinghai CHQ
Taiwan TAI
Tibet CHT
Yakutiya YAK
Assam ASS ASIA-TROPICAL
Bangladesh BAN
India IND
Laos LAO
Vietnam VIE

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 52 in flower of 63 examined

Proportion of examined Cnidium monnieri in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 5 8 63% 31% to 86%
Feb 12 16 75% 51% to 90%
Mar 5 6 83% 44% to 97%
Apr 2 3 too few examined
May 16 16 100% 81% to 100%
Jun 6 7 86% 49% to 97%
Jul 1 1 too few examined
Aug 3 3 too few examined
Sep 0 0 too few examined
Oct 0 0 too few examined
Nov 0 1 too few examined
Dec 2 2 too few examined

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Cnidium monnieri 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. 52 of 63 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 7 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 166 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -24.8 °C -0.3 °C 13.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 25.3 °C 31.3 °C 33.4 °C
Annual rainfall 539 mm 1,279 mm 1,928 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 10 mm 75 mm 246 mm

It is found where winters are severely cold. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 166 research-grade observations of Cnidium monnieri 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.

  • Ammi daucifolium Buch.-Ham.
  • Athamanta crithmoides Lapeyr.
  • Athamanta daucifolia Host
  • Athamanta daucifolia Lag.
  • Athamanta libanotis var. pyrenaica (Jacq.) Roth
  • Athamanta pyrenaica Jacq.
  • Cicuta monnieri Crantz
  • Cicuta sinensis Zuccagni
  • Cnidium confertum Moench
  • Cnidium formosanum Y.Yabe
  • Cnidium microcarpum Turcz.
  • Cnidium microcarpum Turcz. ex Steud.
  • Cnidium mongolicum H.Wolff
  • Ligusticopsis mongolica (H.Wolff) Leute
  • Ligusticum minus Lam.
  • Ligusticum mongolicum (H.Wolff) Leute
  • Ligusticum monnieri Calest.
  • Pinasgelon monnieri (L.) Raf.
  • Selinum densiflorum Salisb.
  • Selinum monnieri L.
  • Seseli daucifolium C.B.Clarke

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.