Himantoglossum hircinum(L.) Spreng.

Lizard orchid

WFO wfo-0000982424 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Himantoglossum hircinum, photographed by dschigel
fig. a dschigel, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-23 / obs. 200254309

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 16 botanical countries

Regions where Himantoglossum hircinum is native: Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Austria, Belgium, Czechia-Slovakia, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Sardegna, Sicilia, Spain, Switzerland AlgeriaMoroccoTunisiaAustriaBelgiumCzechia-SlovakiaFranceGermanyHungaryItalyNetherlandsSiciliaSpainSwitzerland Sardegna
Native distribution of Himantoglossum hircinum, 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
Austria AUT EUROPE
Belgium BGM
Czechia-Slovakia CZE
France FRA
Germany GER
Great Britain GRB
Hungary HUN
Italy ITA
Netherlands NET
Sardegna SAR
Sicilia SIC
Spain SPA
Switzerland SWI
Algeria ALG AFRICA
Morocco MOR
Tunisia TUN

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 1,066 in flower of 1,643 examined

Proportion of examined Himantoglossum hircinum in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 23 0% 0% to 14%
Feb 0 78 0% 0% to 5%
Mar 0 53 0% 0% to 7%
Apr 19 124 15% 10% to 23%
May 509 735 69% 66% to 72%
Jun 502 540 93% 90% to 95%
Jul 36 56 64% 51% to 76%
Aug 0 6 0% 0% to 39%
Sep 0 2 too few examined
Oct 0 10 0% 0% to 28%
Nov 0 10 0% 0% to 28%
Dec 0 6 0% 0% to 39%

Peak flowering in Jun. Each bar is the share of Himantoglossum hircinum 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. 1,066 of 1,643 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. One month has fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for it. 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 1,998 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -3.6 °C -0.4 °C 3.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 20.2 °C 23.7 °C 28.6 °C
Annual rainfall 604 mm 833 mm 1,420 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 90 mm 160 mm 250 mm

It is found where winters bring light 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 1,998 research-grade observations of Himantoglossum hircinum 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 44 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.

  • Aceras hircinum (L.) Lindl.
  • Aceras hircinum var. calamistratum Gallé
  • Aceras hircinum var. divergens Gallé
  • Aceras hircinum var. forcipula Gallé
  • Aceras hircinum var. platyglossum É.Gallé
  • Aceras hircinum var. thuringiacum M.Schulze
  • Himantoglossum hircinum f. acutum Kurt.Wagner
  • Himantoglossum hircinum f. brevibracteatum Kurt.Wagner
  • Himantoglossum hircinum f. brevilaciniatum Kurt.Wagner
  • Himantoglossum hircinum f. calamistratum (Gallé) Soó
  • Himantoglossum hircinum f. coloriglossum Voelckel & Kurt.Wagner
  • Himantoglossum hircinum f. comosum Waisb.
  • Himantoglossum hircinum f. divergens Soó
  • Himantoglossum hircinum f. forcipula (Gallé) Soó
  • Himantoglossum hircinum f. latisectum Waisb.
  • Himantoglossum hircinum f. laxiflorum W.Zimm.
  • Himantoglossum hircinum f. longelaciniatum Kurt.Wagner
  • Himantoglossum hircinum f. purpureum Kurt.Wagner
  • Himantoglossum hircinum f. thuringiacum (M.Schulze) M.Schulze
  • Himantoglossum hircinum lus. albidum W.Zimm.
  • Himantoglossum hircinum lus. inodorum Kurt.Wagner
  • Himantoglossum hircinum lus. viridans W.Zimm.
  • Himantoglossum hircinum var. aestivalis Kreutz & Steinfeld
  • Himantoglossum hircinum var. altum Kurt.Wagner

and 20 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. 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.