Launaea intybacea (achicoria azul)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Launaea intybacea, photographed by Alexis López Hernández — fig. a Alexis López Hernández, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-04-18 / obs. 128359749

Launaea intybacea, photographed by Francisco Farriols Sarabia — fig. b Francisco Farriols Sarabia, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 62378173

Launaea intybacea, photographed by Eric Knight — fig. c Eric Knight, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 47190772

Launaea intybacea, photographed by Duarte Frade — fig. e Duarte Frade, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 55485071

Launaea intybacea, photographed by Juan Cruzado Cortés — fig. g Juan Cruzado Cortés, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 60377696

Launaea intybacea, photographed by W. Terry Hunefeld — fig. h W. Terry Hunefeld, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 13270732

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: Smithsonian, US National Herbarium
Accession: US 3233212
Filed as: Launaea intybacea (Jacq.) Beauverd
Det. by: Robinson, Harold E., (US)
Collected: P. Acevedo-Rodr. & A. Siaca 1993-03-01
Origin: VI
The sheet: View the digitised specimen (CC0 1.0)

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 31 botanical countries

Native distribution of Launaea intybacea, 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
Angola	ANG	AFRICA
Botswana	BOT
Burkina	BKN
Cape Verde	CVI
Comoros	COM
Djibouti	DJI
Egypt	EGY
Eritrea	ERI
Ethiopia	ETH
Ivory Coast	IVO
Kenya	KEN
Madagascar	MDG
Mauritania	MTN
Mozambique	MOZ
Namibia	NAM
Niger	NGR
Nigeria	NGA
Northern Provinces	TVL
Senegal	SEN
Somalia	SOM
Sudan-South Sudan	SUD
Tanzania	TAN
India	IND	ASIA-TROPICAL
Myanmar	MYA
Pakistan	PAK
Sri Lanka	SRL
West Himalaya	WHM
Gulf States	GST	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Oman	OMA
Saudi Arabia	SAU
Yemen	YEM

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 139 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	10.2 °C	20.2 °C	25.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	27.2 °C	29.1 °C	35.3 °C
Annual rainfall	52 mm	631 mm	1,382 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	1 mm	64 mm	169 mm

It is not found anywhere that gets close to freezing. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 139 research-grade observations of Launaea intybacea 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 38 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.

Brachyramphus caribaeus DC.
Brachyramphus goraeensis (Lam.) DC.
Brachyramphus heyneanus Wight
Brachyramphus intybaceus (Jacq.) DC.
Brachyramphus remotiflorus (DC.) Kamelin
Brachyramphus schimperi Sch.Bip. ex Schweinf.
Brachyramphus sonchifolius Thwaites
Brachyramphus sonchifolius DC.
Brachyramphus taraxacoides DC.
Chondrilla indica Steud.
Cicerbita intybacea (Jacq.) Wallr.
Lactuca caribaea (DC.) Sch.Bip.
Lactuca goraeensis Sch.Bip.
Lactuca goraeensis var. effusa A.Terracc.
Lactuca goraeensis var. effusa Chiov.
Lactuca goraeensis var. glomerata Terraciano
Lactuca goraeensis var. glomerata A.Terracc.
Lactuca goraeensis var. goraeensis
Lactuca heyneana DC.
Lactuca intybacea Jacq.
Lactuca nudicaulis var. major Bolle
Lactuca pinnatifida (Lour.) Merr.
Lactuca remotiflora DC.
Lactuca remotiflora DC. ex Wight

and 14 more.

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.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.