Eryngium ebracteatum

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Eryngium ebracteatum, photographed by Hugo Hulsberg — fig. b Hugo Hulsberg, CC0 1.0 / obs. 173177432

Eryngium ebracteatum, photographed by Matias Cabezas — fig. c Matias Cabezas, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 169381560

Eryngium ebracteatum, photographed by Bahiano Ayala — fig. d Bahiano Ayala, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 115373899

Eryngium ebracteatum, photographed by Tsssss — fig. g Tsssss, CC0 1.0 / obs. 100605526

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 15 botanical countries

Native distribution of Eryngium ebracteatum, 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
Argentina Northeast	AGE	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Argentina Northwest	AGW
Bolivia	BOL
Brazil North	BZN
Brazil Northeast	BZE
Brazil South	BZS
Brazil Southeast	BZL
Brazil West-Central	BZC
Colombia	CLM
Costa Rica	COS
Honduras	HON
Nicaragua	NIC
Paraguay	PAR
Uruguay	URU
Venezuela	VEN

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 201 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	3.0 °C	7.7 °C	12.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	22.4 °C	28.6 °C	32.1 °C
Annual rainfall	969 mm	1,131 mm	1,801 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	25 mm	161 mm	330 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 201 research-grade observations of Eryngium ebracteatum 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 7 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 boissieuanum H.Wolff
Eryngium caricinum Standl.
Eryngium ebracteatum var. plicatum Beauverd
Eryngium ebracteatum var. poterioides (Griseb.) Urb.
Eryngium ebracteatum var. typicum H.Wolff
Eryngium nudiflorum Willd. ex Spreng.
Eryngium poterioides Griseb.

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.
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.