Helianthemum apenninum(L.) Mill.

WFO wfo-0000717300 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Helianthemum apenninum, photographed by Fabien Piednoir
fig. a Fabien Piednoir, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-04-29 / obs. 192303103
Helianthemum apenninum, photographed by veroalsace
fig. b veroalsace, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 191376849
Helianthemum apenninum, photographed by Rafael Medina
fig. c Rafael Medina, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 173503372
Helianthemum apenninum, photographed by Wouter Van Landuyt
fig. d Wouter Van Landuyt, CC0 1.0 / obs. 152159967
Helianthemum apenninum, photographed by Stefan Haag
fig. e Stefan Haag, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 132659058
Helianthemum apenninum, photographed by Adrien BENOIT à la GUILLAUME
fig. f Adrien BENOIT à la GUILLAUME, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 130359969
Helianthemum apenninum, photographed by Thomas M
fig. g Thomas M, CC0 1.0 / obs. 128686448
Helianthemum apenninum, photographed by Ben Costamagna
fig. h Ben Costamagna, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 126975714

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 13 botanical countries

Regions where Helianthemum apenninum is native: East Aegean Is., Albania, Baleares, Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, Kriti, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland East Aegean Is.AlbaniaBelgiumFranceGermanyGreeceItalyKritiPortugalSpainSwitzerland Baleares
Native distribution of Helianthemum apenninum, 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
Belgium BGM
France FRA
Germany GER
Great Britain GRB
Greece GRC
Italy ITA
Kriti KRI
Portugal POR
Spain SPA
Switzerland SWI
East Aegean Is. EAI ASIA-TEMPERATE

Not drawn on the map: Great Britain. We hold no public-domain boundary for this region, so it is listed rather than guessed at.

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 754 in flower of 781 examined

Peak flowering in Nov. Each bar is the share of Helianthemum apenninum 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. 754 of 781 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 2 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 1,988 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -6.3 °C -0.4 °C 4.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 21.0 °C 25.5 °C 30.2 °C
Annual rainfall 537 mm 865 mm 1,412 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 50 mm 143 mm 226 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 1,988 research-grade observations of Helianthemum apenninum 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 96 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.

  • Cistus apenninus L.
  • Cistus barbatus Lam.
  • Cistus galactites Schmidel
  • Cistus hirsutus Lam.
  • Cistus humilis Salisb.
  • Cistus linearis Cav.
  • Cistus lusitanicus Mill.
  • Cistus luteus Gilib.
  • Cistus myrthifolius Lam.
  • Cistus piliferus J.F.Gmel. ex Willk. & Lange
  • Cistus polifolius L.
  • Cistus stoechadifolius Brot.
  • Fumana polifolia (L.) Raf.
  • Helianthemum apenninum f. stoechadifolium (Brot.) C.Vicioso
  • Helianthemum apenninum subsp. lazarei Raynaud
  • Helianthemum apenninum subsp. rothmaleri (Villar) M.Mayor & Fern.Benito
  • Helianthemum apenninum var. angustifolium C.K.Schneid.
  • Helianthemum apenninum var. argentatum Pau
  • Helianthemum apenninum var. oblongifolium C.K.Schneid.
  • Helianthemum apenninum var. polifolium (L.) Samp.
  • Helianthemum apenninum var. pulverulentum Fiori
  • Helianthemum barbatum (Lam.) Sweet
  • Helianthemum calcareum Jord.
  • Helianthemum chamaecistus subsp. barbatum (Lam.) Grosser

and 72 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.