Moenchia erecta (upright chickweed)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Moenchia erecta, photographed by yatesy — fig. a yatesy, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-10-22 / obs. 165757630

Moenchia erecta, photographed by Andrew Allen — fig. b Andrew Allen, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 160803051

Moenchia erecta, photographed by Joe Potter Butler — fig. c Joe Potter Butler, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 160382573

Moenchia erecta, photographed by Kym Nicolson — fig. d Kym Nicolson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 156553427

Moenchia erecta, photographed by Dan Wrench — fig. e Dan Wrench, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 127739553

Moenchia erecta, photographed by Yves Bas — fig. f Yves Bas, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 140138199

Moenchia erecta, photographed by Alice Shanks — fig. g Alice Shanks, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 99538464

Moenchia erecta, photographed by Elspeth Swan — fig. h Elspeth Swan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 97704896

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 20 botanical countries

Native distribution of Moenchia erecta, 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
Belgium	BGM	EUROPE
Bulgaria	BUL
Corse	COR
France	FRA
Germany	GER
Great Britain	GRB
Greece	GRC
Italy	ITA
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Portugal	POR
Sardegna	SAR
Sicilia	SIC
Spain	SPA
Türkiye-in-Europe	TUE
Algeria	ALG	AFRICA
Morocco	MOR
Tunisia	TUN
Lebanon-Syria	LBS	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Palestine	PAL
Türkiye	TUR

Not drawn on the map: Great Britain. We hold no public-domain boundary for this region, so it is listed rather than guessed at.

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 36 in flower of 45 examined

70%

60%

83%

92%

Proportion of examined Moenchia erecta in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	1	1	too few examined
Feb	0	0	too few examined
Mar	2	2	too few examined
Apr	7	10	70%	40% to 89%
May	3	5	60%	23% to 88%
Jun	0	0	too few examined
Jul	0	0	too few examined
Aug	0	0	too few examined
Sep	10	12	83%	55% to 95%
Oct	12	13	92%	67% to 99%
Nov	1	2	too few examined
Dec	0	0	too few examined

Peak flowering in Oct. Each bar is the share of Moenchia erecta 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. 36 of 45 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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 325 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-1.7 °C	3.3 °C	8.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	17.4 °C	24.2 °C	29.9 °C
Annual rainfall	611 mm	785 mm	1,431 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	44 mm	129 mm	198 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 325 research-grade observations of Moenchia erecta 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 15 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.

Alsine erecta (L.) Crantz
Alsine quaternella E.H.L.Krause
Alsinella erecta Moench
Cerastium erectum Coss. & Germ.
Cerastium erectum Cosson & Germ.
Cerastium octandrum E.G.Camus
Cerastium quaternellum Fenzl
Doerriena erecta Borkh.
Malachium erectum (L.) Gren.
Malachium octandrum (Ziz ex Mert. & W.D.J.Koch) Gren.
Moenchia erecta subsp. erecta
Moenchia erecta subsp. octandra (Ziz ex Mert. & W.D.J.Koch) Cout.
Moenchia octandra J.Gay
Sagina erecta L.
Sagina octandra Ziz ex Mert. & W.D.J.Koch

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.