Euphorbia myrsinitesL.

myrtle spurge

WFO wfo-0000963501 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Euphorbia myrsinites, photographed by Ben Costamagna
fig. a Ben Costamagna, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-15 / obs. 198109091

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
The New York Botanical Garden
Accession
732969
Filed as
Euphorbia myrsinites L.
Det. by
not recorded on this sheet
Collected
N. H. Holmgren 2001-06-18
Origin
US
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. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. 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 herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 17 botanical countries

Regions where Euphorbia myrsinites is native: Iran, North Caucasus, Transcaucasus, Türkiye, Albania, Baleares, Bulgaria, Corse, Greece, Italy, Kriti, Krym, NW. Balkan Pen., Romania, Sicilia, Türkiye-in-Europe, Ukraine IranNorth CaucasusTranscaucasusTürkiyeAlbaniaBulgariaCorseGreeceItalyKritiKrymNW. Balkan Pen.RomaniaSiciliaTürkiye-in-EuropeUkraine Baleares
Native distribution of Euphorbia myrsinites, 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
Albania ALB EUROPE
Baleares BAL
Bulgaria BUL
Corse COR
Greece GRC
Italy ITA
Kriti KRI
Krym KRY
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Romania ROM
Sicilia SIC
Türkiye-in-Europe TUE
Ukraine UKR
Iran IRN ASIA-TEMPERATE
North Caucasus NCS
Transcaucasus TCS
Türkiye TUR

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 279 in flower of 466 examined

Proportion of examined Euphorbia myrsinites in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 11 0% 0% to 26%
Feb 7 22 32% 16% to 53%
Mar 78 94 83% 74% to 89%
Apr 121 129 94% 88% to 97%
May 67 92 73% 63% to 81%
Jun 4 21 19% 8% to 40%
Jul 2 26 8% 2% to 24%
Aug 0 20 0% 0% to 16%
Sep 0 18 0% 0% to 18%
Oct 0 14 0% 0% to 22%
Nov 0 8 0% 0% to 32%
Dec 0 11 0% 0% to 26%

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Euphorbia myrsinites 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. 279 of 466 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.

When it blooms, where you are 1 state

StatePeaksObservations in flower
Utah Apr 93

Where it actually grows measured, from 2,041 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -9.6 °C -5.3 °C 3.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 20.5 °C 26.9 °C 32.3 °C
Annual rainfall 337 mm 649 mm 1,548 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 33 mm 97 mm 241 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 2,041 research-grade observations of Euphorbia myrsinites 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 13 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.

  • Endoisila myrsinites Raf.
  • Euphorbia curtifolia Chaub.
  • Euphorbia marschalliana Kotschy ex Boiss.
  • Euphorbia myrsinites subsp. pontica (Prokh.) R.Turner
  • Euphorbia pectinata Albov
  • Euphorbia pontica Prokh.
  • Euphorbia rechingeri Greuter
  • Euphorbia rigida Loisel.
  • Euphorbion myrsinitum St.-Lag.
  • Galarhoeus myrsinites Haw.
  • Murtekias myrsinites Raf.
  • Tithymalus myrsinites (L.) Hill
  • Tithymalus rechingeri (Greuter) Soják

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.