Echium sabulicolaPomel

Sand Viper's Gloss

WFO wfo-0000663049 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Echium sabulicola, photographed by carnifex
fig. a carnifex, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-09 / obs. 202150586

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
K000958705
Filed as
Echium sabulicola Pomel
Det. by
Illegible
Collected
s.coll.
Origin
ES
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. We link to the digitised sheet rather than rehosting it, because the holding institutions do not serve their images to third parties reliably and we are not going to show you a picture we cannot actually deliver. 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 sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 12 botanical countries

Regions where Echium sabulicola is native: Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Baleares, Corse, France, Italy, Sardegna, Sicilia, Spain AlgeriaEgyptLibyaMoroccoTunisiaCorseFranceItalySiciliaSpain BalearesSardegna
Native distribution of Echium sabulicola, 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
Baleares BAL EUROPE
Corse COR
France FRA
Italy ITA
Sardegna SAR
Sicilia SIC
Spain SPA
Algeria ALG AFRICA
Egypt EGY
Libya LBY
Morocco MOR
Tunisia TUN

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 880 in flower of 890 examined

Proportion of examined Echium sabulicola in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 61 62 98% 91% to 100%
Feb 110 111 99% 95% to 100%
Mar 205 206 100% 97% to 100%
Apr 209 209 100% 98% to 100%
May 168 169 99% 97% to 100%
Jun 41 41 100% 91% to 100%
Jul 22 22 100% 85% to 100%
Aug 6 6 100% 61% to 100%
Sep 9 10 90% 60% to 98%
Oct 9 11 82% 52% to 95%
Nov 17 19 89% 69% to 97%
Dec 23 24 96% 80% to 99%

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Echium sabulicola 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. 880 of 890 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 590 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 5.1 °C 9.1 °C 11.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 25.9 °C 28.5 °C 32.2 °C
Annual rainfall 259 mm 503 mm 735 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 11 mm 26 mm 58 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 590 research-grade observations of Echium sabulicola 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 24 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.

  • Echium abdelrhamanii Sennen
  • Echium augustini Sennen & Mauricio
  • Echium briquetii Sennen
  • Echium confusum Coincy
  • Echium decipiens Pomel
  • Echium espagnolis Sennen & Mauricio
  • Echium hispidissimum Sennen
  • Echium horrendum Sennen & Mauricio
  • Echium jahandiezii Sennen & Mauricio
  • Echium maireanum Sennen
  • Echium masguindalii Sennen
  • Echium ortizii Sennen
  • Echium paniaguae Sennen & Mauricio
  • Echium perplexans Maire
  • Echium philothei Sennen
  • Echium proditorum Sennen & Mauricio
  • Echium pulchrum Sennen & Mauricio
  • Echium pustulatum var. paniculatum Pau & Font Quer
  • Echium rifeum Pau
  • Echium riofrioi Sennen
  • Echium sabulicola var. gussonei Klotz
  • Echium sabulicola var. rifeum (Pau) Klotz
  • Echium tercianum Sennen
  • Echium vidalii Sennen

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.