Hypericum perfoliatum

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 7 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 7 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.

Hypericum perfoliatum, photographed by Yves Bas — fig. a Yves Bas, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-01 / obs. 193526145

Hypericum perfoliatum, photographed by Dyhia YOUSFI — fig. b Dyhia YOUSFI, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 131807299

Hypericum perfoliatum, photographed by Andre Hosper — fig. d Andre Hosper, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 196187930

Hypericum perfoliatum, photographed by Riccardo Rocca — fig. e Riccardo Rocca, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 195924689

Hypericum perfoliatum, photographed by Karim Haddad — fig. f Karim Haddad, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 73378335

Hypericum perfoliatum, photographed by Ricardo Lima — fig. g Ricardo Lima, CC0 1.0 / obs. 84499859

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: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Accession: K000677044
Filed as: Hypericum perfoliatum L.
Det. by: Robson, N.K.B.
Collected: Heldreich 1846-04-01
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 18 botanical countries

Native distribution of Hypericum perfoliatum, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Baleares	BAL	EUROPE
Corse	COR
France	FRA
Greece	GRC
Italy	ITA
Kriti	KRI
Portugal	POR
Sardegna	SAR
Sicilia	SIC
Spain	SPA
Algeria	ALG	AFRICA
Canary Is.	CNY
Madeira	MDR
Morocco	MOR
Tunisia	TUN
Cyprus	CYP	ASIA-TEMPERATE
East Aegean Is.	EAI
Türkiye	TUR

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 78 in flower of 93 examined

79%

96%

38%

Proportion of examined Hypericum perfoliatum in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	0	too few examined
Feb	0	0	too few examined
Mar	0	0	too few examined
Apr	30	38	79%	64% to 89%
May	45	47	96%	86% to 99%
Jun	3	8	38%	14% to 69%
Jul	0	0	too few examined
Aug	0	0	too few examined
Sep	0	0	too few examined
Oct	0	0	too few examined
Nov	0	0	too few examined
Dec	0	0	too few examined

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Hypericum perfoliatum 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. 78 of 93 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 9 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 184 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	1.3 °C	7.3 °C	10.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	23.3 °C	26.9 °C	32.4 °C
Annual rainfall	500 mm	739 mm	1,107 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	7 mm	28 mm	106 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 184 research-grade observations of Hypericum perfoliatum 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 23 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.

Hypericum bocconei (Ten.) Nyman
Hypericum ciliatum Desr.
Hypericum ciliatum var. acutifolium Choisy
Hypericum ciliatum var. angustifolium Guss.
Hypericum ciliatum var. heldreichii (Boiss.) Boiss.
Hypericum ciliatum var. latifolium Guss.
Hypericum dentatum Loisel.
Hypericum elegans Bertol.
Hypericum heldreichii Boiss.
Hypericum montanum var. punctatum Andr.
Hypericum myrtifolium Spach
Hypericum perfoliatum f. breviciliatum H.Lindb.
Hypericum perfoliatum subsp. heldreichii (Boiss.) Nyman
Hypericum perfoliatum var. amblysepalum Hausskn.
Hypericum perfoliatum var. angustifolium Parl.
Hypericum perfoliatum var. angustifolium DC.
Hypericum perfoliatum var. bocconei Ten.
Hypericum perfoliatum var. heldreichii (Boiss.) Halácsy
Hypericum perfoliatum var. latifolium Gaudin
Hypericum perfoliatum var. microphyllum DC.
Hypericum perfoliatum var. nanum Gaudin
Hypericum plasonii Formánek
Hypericum virgatum Sol. ex E.D.Clarke

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.