Lycium europaeum

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 4 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 4 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.

Lycium europaeum, photographed by Duarte Frade — fig. a Duarte Frade, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-17 / obs. 198590874

Lycium europaeum, photographed by Francesco Cecere — fig. c Francesco Cecere, CC0 1.0 / obs. 11150233

Lycium europaeum, photographed by Santiago Martín-Bravo — fig. e Santiago Martín-Bravo, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 179110414

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 21 botanical countries

Native distribution of Lycium europaeum, 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
Albania	ALB	EUROPE
Corse	COR
France	FRA
Greece	GRC
Italy	ITA
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Portugal	POR
Sardegna	SAR
Sicilia	SIC
Spain	SPA
Türkiye-in-Europe	TUE
Algeria	ALG	AFRICA
Egypt	EGY
Libya	LBY
Morocco	MOR
Tunisia	TUN
East Aegean Is.	EAI	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Lebanon-Syria	LBS
Palestine	PAL
Sinai	SIN
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 31 in flower of 41 examined

80%

83%

71%

Proportion of examined Lycium europaeum in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	3	3	too few examined
Feb	1	1	too few examined
Mar	3	3	too few examined
Apr	1	1	too few examined
May	1	4	too few examined
Jun	1	1	too few examined
Jul	1	1	too few examined
Aug	4	5	80%	38% to 96%
Sep	5	6	83%	44% to 97%
Oct	5	6	83%	44% to 97%
Nov	5	7	71%	36% to 92%
Dec	1	3	too few examined

Peak flowering in Sep. Each bar is the share of Lycium europaeum 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. 31 of 41 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 8 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.

Also published as 14 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.

Jasminoides rhombifolium Moench
Lycium abeliiflorum Rchb.
Lycium abeliifolia (Rchb.) A.Terracc.
Lycium dumosum Salisb.
Lycium europaeum Gouan
Lycium europaeum G.W.Schimp. ex Dunal
Lycium europaeum f. abeliifolia (Rchb.) A.Terracc.
Lycium europaeum subsp. normale A.Terracc.
Lycium europaeum subvar. saevum (Miers) A.Terracc.
Lycium mediterraneum Dunal
Lycium orientale Miers
Lycium saevum Miers
Lycium salicifolium Mill.
Lycium spina-christi Sennen & Elias

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.