Cyclamen purpurascens (European Cyclamen)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Cyclamen purpurascens, photographed by Andrea Adelfio — fig. a Andrea Adelfio, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-12 / obs. 205708001

Cyclamen purpurascens, photographed by Elias — fig. b Elias, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204451788

Cyclamen purpurascens, photographed by antrum — fig. d antrum, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 192218039

Cyclamen purpurascens, photographed by Gabriel Mayrhofer — fig. e Gabriel Mayrhofer, CC0 1.0 / obs. 187362761

Cyclamen purpurascens, photographed by Tristan Haab — fig. f Tristan Haab, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 185661183

Cyclamen purpurascens, photographed by E. A. — fig. h E. A., CC BY 4.0 / obs. 184679133

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 10 botanical countries

Native distribution of Cyclamen purpurascens, 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
Austria	AUT	EUROPE
Czechia-Slovakia	CZE
France	FRA
Germany	GER
Greece	GRC
Hungary	HUN
Italy	ITA
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Poland	POL
Switzerland	SWI

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 1,633 in flower of 2,290 examined

10%

84%

98%

99%

93%

75%

42%

Proportion of examined Cyclamen purpurascens in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	3	60	5%	2% to 14%
Feb	3	94	3%	1% to 9%
Mar	5	94	5%	2% to 12%
Apr	5	129	4%	2% to 9%
May	9	88	10%	5% to 18%
Jun	103	123	84%	76% to 89%
Jul	355	361	98%	96% to 99%
Aug	593	601	99%	97% to 99%
Sep	351	376	93%	90% to 95%
Oct	165	221	75%	69% to 80%
Nov	38	90	42%	33% to 53%
Dec	3	53	6%	2% to 15%

Peak flowering in Aug. Each bar is the share of Cyclamen purpurascens 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. 1,633 of 2,290 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 1,990 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-8.9 °C	-5.3 °C	-2.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	19.3 °C	23.6 °C	26.2 °C
Annual rainfall	640 mm	1,217 mm	2,144 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	94 mm	178 mm	379 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 1,990 research-grade observations of Cyclamen purpurascens 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 26 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.

Cyclamen aestivum Rchb.
Cyclamen breviflorum Jord.
Cyclamen clusii Lindl.
Cyclamen cordifolium Stokes
Cyclamen cyclophyllum Jord.
Cyclamen deltoideum Tausch
Cyclamen europaeum L.
Cyclamen europaeum var. immaculatum Hrabětová
Cyclamen europaeum var. littorale (Sadler ex Rchb.) Guiheneuf
Cyclamen europaeum var. peakianum Guiheneuf
Cyclamen fatrense Halda & Soják
Cyclamen floridum Salisb.
Cyclamen hastatum Tausch
Cyclamen holochlorum Jord.
Cyclamen lilacinum Jord.
Cyclamen littorale Sadler ex Rchb.
Cyclamen officinale Wender. ex Steud.
Cyclamen officinarum Wender.
Cyclamen purpurascens f. album Grey-Wilson
Cyclamen purpurascens f. carmineolineatum Hendrikx
Cyclamen retroflexum Moench
Cyclamen rotundifolium St Lager
Cyclamen umbratile Jord.
Cyclamen variegatum Pohl

and 2 more.

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.