Eryngium amethystinum (amethyst eryngo)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Eryngium amethystinum, photographed by Pavel Kacl — fig. a Pavel Kacl, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-09-30 / obs. 160684255

Eryngium amethystinum, photographed by Danijel Ostović — fig. e Danijel Ostović, CC0 1.0 / obs. 157211702

Eryngium amethystinum, photographed by Mario Bassini — fig. f Mario Bassini, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 155890465

Eryngium amethystinum, photographed by Juraj Ahel — fig. g Juraj Ahel, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 160715216

Eryngium amethystinum, photographed by bemma — fig. h bemma, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 152075527

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 5 botanical countries

Native distribution of Eryngium amethystinum, 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
Albania	ALB	EUROPE
Greece	GRC
Italy	ITA
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Sicilia	SIC

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 269 in flower of 305 examined

43%

94%

93%

84%

55%

Proportion of examined Eryngium amethystinum in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	0	too few examined
Feb	0	0	too few examined
Mar	0	0	too few examined
Apr	0	1	too few examined
May	0	0	too few examined
Jun	3	7	43%	16% to 75%
Jul	90	96	94%	87% to 97%
Aug	127	136	93%	88% to 96%
Sep	41	49	84%	71% to 91%
Oct	6	11	55%	28% to 79%
Nov	1	3	too few examined
Dec	1	2	too few examined

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Eryngium amethystinum 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. 269 of 305 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 1,647 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-6.3 °C	-1.2 °C	6.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	20.4 °C	25.3 °C	29.2 °C
Annual rainfall	807 mm	1,228 mm	2,034 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	99 mm	192 mm	355 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 1,647 research-grade observations of Eryngium amethystinum 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 10 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.

Eryngium amethystinum f. cupreum Pamp.
Eryngium amethystinum f. macrophyllum Pamp.
Eryngium amethystinum f. trichophyllum Pamp.
Eryngium australe Wulfen & West ex Schult.
Eryngium caeruleum Link
Eryngium dilatatum Guss.
Eryngium multifidum Sm.
Eryngium multifidum var. transiens Halácsy
Eryngium orientale Mill.
Eryngium siculum Lojac.

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.