Lactuca tuberosa

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Lactuca tuberosa, photographed by Eleftherios Katsillis — fig. b Eleftherios Katsillis, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 127958808

Lactuca tuberosa, photographed by Nasser Halaweh — fig. f Nasser Halaweh, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 28858860

Lactuca tuberosa, photographed by Алена Ручка — fig. g Алена Ручка, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 77431910

Lactuca tuberosa, photographed by Katerina Kalogerini — fig. h Katerina Kalogerini, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 41227556

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 18 botanical countries

Native distribution of Lactuca tuberosa, 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
Iran	IRN
Iraq	IRQ
Lebanon-Syria	LBS
North Caucasus	NCS
Oman	OMA
Palestine	PAL
Transcaucasus	TCS
Türkiye	TUR
Albania	ALB	EUROPE
Bulgaria	BUL
Greece	GRC
Kriti	KRI
Krym	KRY
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Ukraine	UKR
Libya	LBY	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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 297 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-2.4 °C	3.9 °C	10.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	25.0 °C	29.6 °C	32.3 °C
Annual rainfall	544 mm	693 mm	981 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	2 mm	4 mm	168 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 297 research-grade observations of Lactuca tuberosa 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 11 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.

Agathyrsus sonchifolius (Willd.) Sweet
Lactuca cretica Desf.
Lactuca petraea DC.
Lactuca sonchifolia Willd.
Sonchus tuberosus L.
Steptorhamphus linczevskii Kirp.
Steptorhamphus petraeus (Fisch. & C.A.Mey. ex DC.) Grossh.
Steptorhamphus tuberosus (Jacq.) Grossh.
Steptorhamphus tuberosus subsp. petraeus (Fisch. & C.A.Mey. ex DC.) Takht.
Steptorhamphus tuberosus subsp. tuberosus
Wiestia tuberosa (Jacq.) Sch.Bip.

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.