Eryngium creticum (eryngo)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Eryngium creticum, photographed by Eleftherios Katsillis — fig. a Eleftherios Katsillis, CC BY 4.0 / 2020-12-16 / obs. 107522926

Eryngium creticum, photographed by Kostas Zontanos — fig. b Kostas Zontanos, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 45959589

Eryngium creticum, photographed by Even Dankowicz — fig. c Even Dankowicz, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 53576093

Eryngium creticum, photographed by Daniel Cahen — fig. e Daniel Cahen, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 28554907

Eryngium creticum, photographed by Niko Ioannidis — fig. f Niko Ioannidis, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203839060

Eryngium creticum, photographed by George Papademetriou — fig. g George Papademetriou, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 147208620

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 16 botanical countries

Native distribution of Eryngium creticum, 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
Cyprus	CYP	ASIA-TEMPERATE
East Aegean Is.	EAI
Iran	IRN
Iraq	IRQ
Lebanon-Syria	LBS
Palestine	PAL
Sinai	SIN
Türkiye	TUR
Albania	ALB	EUROPE
Bulgaria	BUL
Greece	GRC
Italy	ITA
Kriti	KRI
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Türkiye-in-Europe	TUE
Egypt	EGY	AFRICA

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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 393 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-0.4 °C	5.5 °C	11.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	25.9 °C	30.5 °C	34.2 °C
Annual rainfall	413 mm	742 mm	1,126 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	2 mm	5 mm	72 mm

It is found where winters bring light 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 393 research-grade observations of Eryngium creticum 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.

Also published as 2 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 cyaneum Sm.
Eryngium syriacum Lam.

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.