Hornungia alpina(L.) O.Appel

WFO wfo-0000724765 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Hornungia alpina, photographed by Elias
fig. a Elias, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-15 / obs. 197929335

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
02518304
Filed as
Hornungia alpina (L.) O.Appel
Det. by
not recorded on this sheet
Collected
not recorded
Origin
not recorded
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 14 botanical countries

Regions where Hornungia alpina is native: Morocco, Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Czechia-Slovakia, France, Germany, Italy, NW. Balkan Pen., Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Switzerland MoroccoAlbaniaAustriaBulgariaCzechia-SlovakiaFranceGermanyItalyNW. Balkan Pen.PolandPortugalRomaniaSpainSwitzerland
Native distribution of Hornungia alpina, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Albania ALB EUROPE
Austria AUT
Bulgaria BUL
Czechia-Slovakia CZE
France FRA
Germany GER
Italy ITA
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Poland POL
Portugal POR
Romania ROM
Spain SPA
Switzerland SWI
Morocco MOR AFRICA

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 366 in flower of 385 examined

Proportion of examined Hornungia alpina in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 0 too few examined
Feb 1 1 too few examined
Mar 2 2 too few examined
Apr 19 19 100% 83% to 100%
May 45 47 96% 86% to 99%
Jun 101 102 99% 95% to 100%
Jul 110 114 96% 91% to 99%
Aug 65 74 88% 78% to 93%
Sep 14 16 88% 64% to 97%
Oct 9 10 90% 60% to 98%
Nov 0 0 too few examined
Dec 0 0 too few examined

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Hornungia alpina 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. 366 of 385 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 5 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 1,322 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -19.4 °C -14.4 °C -5.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 10.4 °C 13.9 °C 20.4 °C
Annual rainfall 1,204 mm 1,755 mm 2,638 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 159 mm 300 mm 530 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 1,322 research-grade observations of Hornungia alpina 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 38 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.

  • Arabis angustifolia Lam.
  • Astylus alpinus Dulac
  • Capsella alpina Ces., Pass. & Gibelli
  • Crucifera hutchinsia E.H.L.Krause
  • Draba alpina Baumg.
  • Draba nasturtiolum Scop.
  • Hutchinsia affinis Gren. ex F.W.Schultz
  • Hutchinsia alpina (L.) R.Br.
  • Hutchinsia alpina subsp. alpina W.T. Aiton
  • Hutchinsia alpina subsp. austroalpina Trpin
  • Hutchinsia alpina subsp. brevicaulis Arc.
  • Hutchinsia alpina subsp. polatschekii M.Laínz
  • Hutchinsia auerswaldii Willk.
  • Hutchinsia brevicaulis Spreng.
  • Hutchinsia caulifera Schur
  • Hutchinsia font-queri Sauvage
  • Lepidium alpinum L.
  • Lepidium alpinum Siev.
  • Lepidium brevicaule (Spreng.) Hoppe
  • Lepidium halleri Crantz
  • Nasturtium alpinum Crantz
  • Noccaea affinis Rouy & Foucaud
  • Noccaea alpina Rchb.
  • Noccaea auerswaldii Willk.

and 14 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.