Gypsophila elegans (showy baby's-breath)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 4 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 4 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Gypsophila elegans, photographed by Dmitriy Bochkov — fig. a Dmitriy Bochkov, CC BY 4.0 / 2019-07-30 / obs. 47029228

Gypsophila elegans, photographed by Matt Bowser — fig. b Matt Bowser, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 4798095

Gypsophila elegans, photographed by Alan Young — fig. c Alan Young, CC0 1.0 / obs. 205116760

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: 02235902
Filed as: Gypsophila elegans M.Bieb.
Det. by: N. Lachashvili
Collected: N. Lachashvili 2006-05-13
Origin: GE
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 6 botanical countries

Native distribution of Gypsophila elegans, 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
Iran	IRN	ASIA-TEMPERATE
North Caucasus	NCS
Transcaucasus	TCS
Türkiye	TUR
Krym	KRY	EUROPE
Ukraine	UKR

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 144 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-15.9 °C	-8.2 °C	5.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	17.0 °C	22.4 °C	34.3 °C
Annual rainfall	445 mm	895 mm	1,779 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	45 mm	139 mm	308 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 144 research-grade observations of Gypsophila elegans 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.

Named cultivars 1 recorded

Selections of Gypsophila elegans that somebody named and propagated. A cultivar is not a botanical taxon: it is governed by the cultivated-plant code rather than the botanical one, so it appears in no taxonomic backbone, and it has no native range and no wild population of its own. These get no page here, because a cultivar has no photographs, no range and no flowering data of its own, and a page with none of those is not a page.

‘ʽCovent Garden’’ Q110767101

From Wikidata (CC0), joined to this species on its World Flora Online identifier, so the link to the parent is exact rather than a name match. This list is what is recorded in an openly licensed register; it is not every cultivar that exists, and for many genera it is not close. Why, and how far short it falls.

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.

Gypsophila ceballosi Pau & Vicioso
Gypsophila elegans var. elegans
Gypsophila elegans var. latipetala Barkoudah
Gypsophila producta Stapf

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.