Euphrasia alpinaLam.

WFO wfo-1200039206 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Euphrasia alpina, photographed by Marco Mussita
fig. a Marco Mussita, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-09-27 / obs. 160294075

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

Regions where Euphrasia alpina is native: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland FranceGermanyItalySpainSwitzerland
Native distribution of Euphrasia alpina, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
France FRA EUROPE
Germany GER
Italy ITA
Spain SPA
Switzerland SWI

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 140 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -17.3 °C -12.8 °C -4.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 11.6 °C 15.5 °C 19.5 °C
Annual rainfall 1,063 mm 1,534 mm 2,493 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 128 mm 251 mm 396 mm

It is found where winters are severely cold. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 140 research-grade observations of Euphrasia alpina 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 Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.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 31 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.

  • Euphrasia alpina prol. capcirensis Sennen
  • Euphrasia alpina prol. gautieri Sennen
  • Euphrasia alpina prol. ponsii Sennen
  • Euphrasia alpina prol. sennenii (Chabert) Rouy
  • Euphrasia alpina subsp. sennenii (Chabert) Malag. & Barrau
  • Euphrasia alpina unranked vidalii Chabert
  • Euphrasia alpina var. breviaristata Bernoulli ex E.Steiger
  • Euphrasia alpina var. dissecta Gaudin
  • Euphrasia alpina var. grandiflora Gaudin
  • Euphrasia alpina var. marianii Font Quer & Sennen ex Rothm.
  • Euphrasia alpina var. media Gaudin
  • Euphrasia alpina var. nana Wettst.
  • Euphrasia alpina var. porphyrea Burnat
  • Euphrasia alpina var. vestita Gremli
  • Euphrasia alpina var. vidalii Rouy
  • Euphrasia alpina var. viscidula M.Laínz
  • Euphrasia cantabrica Font Quer & Rothm.
  • Euphrasia capcirensis Sennen
  • Euphrasia gautieri Sennen
  • Euphrasia mariani Sennen
  • Euphrasia mixta Gremli
  • Euphrasia nemorosa subsp. alpina (Lam.) H.Marcailhou & A.Marcailhou
  • Euphrasia nemorosa var. alpina (Lam.) Dumort.
  • Euphrasia officinalis subsp. alpina (Lam.) Bonnier

and 7 more.

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. 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.