Eryngium prostratumNutt. ex DC.

creeping eryngo

WFO wfo-0000678171 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Eryngium prostratum, photographed by Sawyer Baran
fig. a Sawyer Baran, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-16 / obs. 201872075
Eryngium prostratum, photographed by Eric Knight
fig. b Eric Knight, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 191918398
Eryngium prostratum, photographed by John Kees
fig. c John Kees, CC0 1.0 / obs. 174066504
Eryngium prostratum, photographed by Dennis White
fig. d Dennis White, CC0 1.0 / obs. 144628769
Eryngium prostratum, photographed by David Weisenbeck
fig. e David Weisenbeck, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 140606012
Eryngium prostratum, photographed by anguspritchard
fig. f anguspritchard, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 137922388
Eryngium prostratum, photographed by ncb1221
fig. g ncb1221, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 126152437
Eryngium prostratum, photographed by John Abrams
fig. h John Abrams, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 95579930

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 17 botanical countries

Regions where Eryngium prostratum is native: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia AlabamaArkansasFloridaGeorgiaIllinoisKansasKentuckyLouisianaMississippiMissouriNorth CarolinaOklahomaSouth CarolinaTennesseeTexasVirginia Delaware
Native distribution of Eryngium prostratum, 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
Alabama ALA NORTHERN AMERICA
Arkansas ARK
Delaware DEL
Florida FLA
Georgia GEO
Illinois ILL
Kansas KAN
Kentucky KTY
Louisiana LOU
Mississippi MSI
Missouri MSO
North Carolina NCA
Oklahoma OKL
South Carolina SCA
Tennessee TEN
Texas TEX
Virginia VRG

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 124 in flower of 150 examined

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Eryngium prostratum 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. 124 of 150 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 5 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 759 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -1.5 °C 1.9 °C 7.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 29.5 °C 32.2 °C 34.0 °C
Annual rainfall 1,140 mm 1,357 mm 1,724 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 221 mm 270 mm 363 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 759 research-grade observations of Eryngium prostratum 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 4 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 prostratum var. disjunctum Fernald
  • Eryngium prostratum var. foliosum Alph.Wood
  • Eryngium prostratum var. prostratum
  • Strebanthus heterophylus Raf.

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.