Hippocrepis unisiliquosa

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.

Hippocrepis unisiliquosa, photographed by Eleftherios Katsillis — fig. a Eleftherios Katsillis, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-04-15 / obs. 121031318

Hippocrepis unisiliquosa, photographed by Even Dankowicz — fig. b Even Dankowicz, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 55801652

Hippocrepis unisiliquosa, photographed by Karim Haddad — fig. d Karim Haddad, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 141498423

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 19 botanical countries

Native distribution of Hippocrepis unisiliquosa, 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
Cyprus	CYP	ASIA-TEMPERATE
East Aegean Is.	EAI
Gulf States	GST
Iran	IRN
Iraq	IRQ
Kuwait	KUW
Lebanon-Syria	LBS
Oman	OMA
Palestine	PAL
Saudi Arabia	SAU
Sinai	SIN
Transcaucasus	TCS
Türkiye	TUR
Greece	GRC	EUROPE
Kriti	KRI
Krym	KRY
Sicilia	SIC
Egypt	EGY	AFRICA
Tunisia	TUN

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 91 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-1.1 °C	5.7 °C	10.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	27.1 °C	31.9 °C	37.2 °C
Annual rainfall	167 mm	653 mm	955 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	1 mm	2 mm	70 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 91 research-grade observations of Hippocrepis unisiliquosa 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 9 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.

Ferrum-equinum uniflorum Moench
Ferrum-equinum unisiliquosum (L.) Medik.
Hippocrepis bisiliqua Forssk.
Hippocrepis flexuosa J.Zahlbr. ex Host
Hippocrepis monocarpa M.Bieb.
Hippocrepis pusilla Fisch. & C.A.Mey. ex Hohen.
Hippocrepis pusilla Hohen.
Hippocrepis univalvis Georgi
Hippocrepis vulgaris Bubani

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.
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.