Fritillaria meleagris (Lazarus bell)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Fritillaria meleagris, photographed by E. Borchert — fig. a E. Borchert, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-01 / obs. 195866259

Fritillaria meleagris, photographed by empressmoth — fig. b empressmoth, CC0 1.0 / obs. 192211558

Fritillaria meleagris, photographed by Jeff Jones — fig. c Jeff Jones, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 188337780

Fritillaria meleagris, photographed by Patrick Hacker — fig. d Patrick Hacker, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 188853318

Fritillaria meleagris, photographed by Donald Davesne — fig. e Donald Davesne, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 188145270

Fritillaria meleagris, photographed by Rachel Webster — fig. g Rachel Webster, CC0 1.0 / obs. 187299162

Fritillaria meleagris, photographed by Jason Grant — fig. h Jason Grant, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 187297870

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 18 botanical countries

Native distribution of Fritillaria meleagris, 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
Austria	AUT	EUROPE
Belarus	BLR
Central European Russia	RUC
Czechia-Slovakia	CZE
France	FRA
Germany	GER
Hungary	HUN
Italy	ITA
Netherlands	NET
Northwest European Russia	RUW
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Poland	POL
Romania	ROM
South European Russia	RUS
Switzerland	SWI
Ukraine	UKR
Altay	ALT	ASIA-TEMPERATE
West Siberia	WSB

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 896 in flower of 927 examined

86%

97%

99%

90%

Proportion of examined Fritillaria meleagris in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	1	1	too few examined
Feb	18	21	86%	65% to 95%
Mar	510	526	97%	95% to 98%
Apr	305	309	99%	97% to 100%
May	60	67	90%	80% to 95%
Jun	1	2	too few examined
Jul	0	0	too few examined
Aug	0	0	too few examined
Sep	0	0	too few examined
Oct	0	0	too few examined
Nov	0	0	too few examined
Dec	1	1	too few examined

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Fritillaria meleagris 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. 896 of 927 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 8 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 1,960 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-11.1 °C	0.7 °C	2.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	17.8 °C	21.8 °C	26.6 °C
Annual rainfall	606 mm	778 mm	1,362 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	83 mm	146 mm	253 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 1,960 research-grade observations of Fritillaria meleagris 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 15 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.

Fritillaria contorta Baker
Fritillaria graminifolia Stokes
Fritillaria lutea Rchb.
Fritillaria major Baker
Fritillaria meleagris subsp. meleagris
Fritillaria meleagris var. contorta (Baker) W.Mill.
Fritillaria montana Sanguin.
Fritillaria pallida Salisb.
Fritillaria praecox K.Koch
Fritillaria tesselata Salisb.
Fritillaria tesselata var. alba Gray
Fritillaria tesselata var. lutea Gray
Fritillaria tesselata var. multiflora Gray
Fritillaria tesselata var. serotina Gray
Lilium meleagris (L.) E.H.L.Krause

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.