Kernera saxatilis(L.) Sweet

WFO wfo-0000356054 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Kernera saxatilis, photographed by Emanuele Santarelli
fig. a Emanuele Santarelli, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2021-06-10 / obs. 135325779

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
05148694
Filed as
Kernera saxatilis (L.) Sweet
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 Kernera saxatilis is native: Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Corse, Czechia-Slovakia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, NW. Balkan Pen., Poland, Romania, Spain, Switzerland AlbaniaAustriaBulgariaCorseCzechia-SlovakiaFranceGermanyGreeceItalyNW. Balkan Pen.PolandRomaniaSpainSwitzerland
Native distribution of Kernera saxatilis, 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
Corse COR
Czechia-Slovakia CZE
France FRA
Germany GER
Greece GRC
Italy ITA
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Poland POL
Romania ROM
Spain SPA
Switzerland SWI

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 53 in flower of 67 examined

Proportion of examined Kernera saxatilis 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 2 4 too few examined
May 19 20 95% 76% to 99%
Jun 25 27 93% 77% to 98%
Jul 7 12 58% 32% to 81%
Aug 0 2 too few examined
Sep 0 1 too few examined
Oct 0 1 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 Kernera saxatilis 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. 53 of 67 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 489 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -15.0 °C -8.4 °C -1.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 14.4 °C 18.8 °C 24.1 °C
Annual rainfall 977 mm 1,579 mm 2,289 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 146 mm 268 mm 437 mm

It is found where winters bring hard 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 489 research-grade observations of Kernera saxatilis 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 20 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.

  • Alyssum alpinum Scop.
  • Alyssum myagroides All.
  • Alyssum rupestre Willd.
  • Camelina myagrodes Moretti
  • Camelina saxatilis (L.) Pers.
  • Cheiranthus auriculatus (Lam.) Lapeyr.
  • Cochlearia decipiens Willk.
  • Cochlearia saxatilis L.
  • Crucifera kernera E.H.L.Krause
  • Gonyclisia saxatilis (L.) Dulac
  • Kernera auriculata (Lam.) Sweet
  • Kernera boissieri Reut.
  • Kernera decipiens Willk.
  • Kernera myagrodes Medik.
  • Kernera saxatilis var. boissieri (Reut.) O.Bolòs & Vigo
  • Myagrum alpinum Lapeyr.
  • Myagrum auriculatum DC.
  • Myagrum montanum J.P.Bergeret
  • Myagrum saxatile (L.) L.
  • Nasturtium saxatile (L.) Crantz

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.