Melomphis arabica

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Melomphis arabica, photographed by Eleftherios Katsillis — fig. b Eleftherios Katsillis, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 122020117

Melomphis arabica, photographed by amantedarmanin — fig. c amantedarmanin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 122182409

Melomphis arabica, photographed by Don Loarie — fig. e Don Loarie, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 7786829

Melomphis arabica, photographed by carnifex — fig. f carnifex, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 202654097

Melomphis arabica, photographed by Ivo Rosa — fig. g Ivo Rosa, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 192762606

Melomphis arabica, photographed by Katrin Simon — fig. h Katrin Simon, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 189582457

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 19 botanical countries

Native distribution of Melomphis arabica, 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
Corse	COR	EUROPE
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
Sudan-South Sudan	SUD
Tunisia	TUN
East Aegean Is.	EAI	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Lebanon-Syria	LBS
Palestine	PAL
Sinai	SIN

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 105 in flower of 111 examined

96%

95%

Proportion of examined Melomphis arabica 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	1	too few examined
Apr	68	71	96%	88% to 99%
May	36	38	95%	83% to 99%
Jun	0	0	too few examined
Jul	0	0	too few examined
Aug	0	0	too few examined
Sep	0	0	too few examined
Oct	0	0	too few examined
Nov	1	1	too few examined
Dec	0	0	too few examined

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Melomphis arabica 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. 105 of 111 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 10 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 247 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	3.5 °C	9.3 °C	12.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	23.4 °C	26.9 °C	33.4 °C
Annual rainfall	406 mm	604 mm	874 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	3 mm	32 mm	75 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 247 research-grade observations of Melomphis arabica 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 17 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.

Caruelia algeriensis Jord.
Caruelia arabica (L.) Parl.
Caruelia hipponensis Jord.
Caruelia macrocoma Jord.
Caruelia ochroleuca Jord.
Caruelia stenopetala Jord.
Eliokarmos aureum Raf.
Melomphis patens Raf.
Myanthe arabica (L.) Salisb.
Ornithogalum arabicum L.
Ornithogalum arabicum var. algeriense (Jord.) Maire
Ornithogalum arabicum var. hipponense (Jord.) Maire
Ornithogalum arabicum var. macrocomum (Jord.) Maire & Weiller
Ornithogalum arabicum var. ochroleucum (Jord.) Maire & Weiller
Ornithogalum arabicum var. stenopetalum (Jord.) Maire & Weiller
Ornithogalum corymbosum Ruiz & Pav.
Ornithogalum speciosum Salisb.

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.