Hyoscyamus nigerL.

Black Henbaneblack henbanehenbane

WFO wfo-0001021850 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Hyoscyamus niger, photographed by Dmitrii Mostovoi
fig. a Dmitrii Mostovoi, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-12 / obs. 205974038

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 23 botanical countries

Regions where Hyoscyamus niger is native: Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, East Aegean Is., Iran, Iraq, Lebanon-Syria, North Caucasus, Transcaucasus, Türkiye, Albania, Bulgaria, Corse, France, Greece, Italy, NW. Balkan Pen., Portugal, Romania, Sardegna, Sicilia, Spain, Türkiye-in-Europe AlgeriaMoroccoTunisiaEast Aegean Is.IranIraqLebanon-SyriaNorth CaucasusTranscaucasusTürkiyeAlbaniaBulgariaCorseFranceGreeceItalyNW. Balkan Pen.PortugalRomaniaSiciliaSpainTürkiye-in-Europe Sardegna
Native distribution of Hyoscyamus niger, 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
Bulgaria BUL
Corse COR
France FRA
Greece GRC
Italy ITA
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Portugal POR
Romania ROM
Sardegna SAR
Sicilia SIC
Spain SPA
Türkiye-in-Europe TUE
East Aegean Is. EAI ASIA-TEMPERATE
Iran IRN
Iraq IRQ
Lebanon-Syria LBS
North Caucasus NCS
Transcaucasus TCS
Türkiye TUR
Algeria ALG AFRICA
Morocco MOR
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.

Flowering 892 in flower of 1,212 examined

Proportion of examined Hyoscyamus niger in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 7 0% 0% to 35%
Feb 0 3 too few examined
Mar 1 9 11% 2% to 44%
Apr 34 57 60% 47% to 71%
May 257 297 87% 82% to 90%
Jun 372 409 91% 88% to 93%
Jul 136 197 69% 62% to 75%
Aug 59 111 53% 44% to 62%
Sep 23 68 34% 24% to 46%
Oct 6 33 18% 9% to 34%
Nov 2 15 13% 4% to 38%
Dec 2 6 33% 10% to 70%

Peak flowering in Jun. Each bar is the share of Hyoscyamus niger 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. 892 of 1,212 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 2,010 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -19.5 °C -10.8 °C 0.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 19.7 °C 24.1 °C 28.8 °C
Annual rainfall 327 mm 556 mm 994 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 31 mm 91 mm 169 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 2,010 research-grade observations of Hyoscyamus niger 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 14 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.

  • Hyoscarpus niger (L.) Dulac
  • Hyoscyamus agrestis Kit. ex Schult.
  • Hyoscyamus auriculatus Ten.
  • Hyoscyamus bohemicus F.W.Schmidt
  • Hyoscyamus lethalis Salisb.
  • Hyoscyamus niger subsp. agrestis (Kit.) Hultén
  • Hyoscyamus niger subsp. niger
  • Hyoscyamus niger var. annuus Sims
  • Hyoscyamus niger var. chinensis Makino
  • Hyoscyamus pallidus Waldst. & Kit. ex Willd.
  • Hyoscyamus persicus Boiss. & Buhse
  • Hyoscyamus pictus Roth
  • Hyoscyamus syspirensis K.Koch
  • Hyoscyamus verviensis Lej.

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.