Launaea arborescens(Batt.) Murb.

WFO wfo-0000049123 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Launaea arborescens, photographed by Alessia Guggisberg
fig. a Alessia Guggisberg, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-04 / obs. 203296549
Launaea arborescens, photographed by Eric Tittley
fig. b Eric Tittley, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 189294005
Launaea arborescens, photographed by Christina s.l.
fig. c Christina s.l., CC BY 4.0 / obs. 183518257
Launaea arborescens, photographed by Mirela
fig. d Mirela, CC0 1.0 / obs. 181933170
Launaea arborescens, photographed by drtimk
fig. e drtimk, CC0 1.0 / obs. 180500655
Launaea arborescens, photographed by Christoph Moning
fig. f Christoph Moning, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 184186490
Launaea arborescens, photographed by John Lyden
fig. g John Lyden, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 179469354
Launaea arborescens, photographed by Mehdi Chetibi
fig. h Mehdi Chetibi, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 179868497

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 9 botanical countries

Regions where Launaea arborescens is native: Algeria, Canary Is., Cape Verde, Madeira, Mauritania, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Baleares, Spain AlgeriaMauritaniaMoroccoSaudi ArabiaSpain Canary Is.Cape VerdeMadeiraBaleares
Native distribution of Launaea arborescens, 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
Algeria ALG AFRICA
Canary Is. CNY
Cape Verde CVI
Madeira MDR
Mauritania MTN
Morocco MOR
Baleares BAL EUROPE
Spain SPA
Saudi Arabia SAU ASIA-TEMPERATE

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 165 in flower of 185 examined

Peak flowering in Oct. Each bar is the share of Launaea arborescens 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. 165 of 185 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 2,011 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 2.5 °C 14.6 °C 16.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 22.6 °C 24.8 °C 36.1 °C
Annual rainfall 118 mm 243 mm 415 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 2 mm 6 mm 21 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 2,011 research-grade observations of Launaea arborescens 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 8 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.

  • Launaea freyniana (Huter, Porta & Rigo ex Porta) Pau
  • Launaea melanostigma Pett.
  • Prenanthes spinosa T.E.Bowdich
  • Sonchus freynianus Huter, Porta & Rigo ex Porta
  • Sonchus freynianus Huter, Porta & Rigo ex Huter
  • Zollikoferia arborescens Batt.
  • Zollikoferia arborescens var. arborescens
  • Zollikoferia arborescens var. cerastina Chabert

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.