Narcissus obsoletus(Haw.) Spach

WFO wfo-0000696849 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Narcissus obsoletus, photographed by Aissa Djamel Filali
fig. a Aissa Djamel Filali, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2020-10-29 / obs. 102867407

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
The New York Botanical Garden
Accession
04736623
Filed as
Narcissus elegans (Haw.) Spach
Det. by
not recorded on this sheet
Collected
A. Faure 1914-11-21
Origin
DZ
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

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 18 botanical countries

Regions where Narcissus obsoletus is native: Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Cyprus, East Aegean Is., Lebanon-Syria, Palestine, Türkiye, Baleares, Corse, Greece, Italy, Kriti, NW. Balkan Pen., Sardegna, Sicilia, Spain AlgeriaLibyaMoroccoTunisiaCyprusEast Aegean Is.Lebanon-SyriaPalestineTürkiyeCorseGreeceItalyKritiNW. Balkan Pen.SiciliaSpain BalearesSardegna
Native distribution of Narcissus obsoletus, 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
Baleares BAL EUROPE
Corse COR
Greece GRC
Italy ITA
Kriti KRI
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Sardegna SAR
Sicilia SIC
Spain SPA
Cyprus CYP ASIA-TEMPERATE
East Aegean Is. EAI
Lebanon-Syria LBS
Palestine PAL
Türkiye TUR
Algeria ALG AFRICA
Libya LBY
Morocco MOR
Tunisia TUN

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 412 in flower of 432 examined

Proportion of examined Narcissus obsoletus in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 1 3 too few examined
Feb 1 2 too few examined
Mar 0 0 too few examined
Apr 0 0 too few examined
May 0 0 too few examined
Jun 0 0 too few examined
Jul 0 0 too few examined
Aug 0 0 too few examined
Sep 32 32 100% 89% to 100%
Oct 197 198 99% 97% to 100%
Nov 144 155 93% 88% to 96%
Dec 37 42 88% 75% to 95%

Peak flowering in Sep. Each bar is the share of Narcissus obsoletus 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. 412 of 432 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 41 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 0.6 °C 8.1 °C 11.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 26.1 °C 27.9 °C 33.4 °C
Annual rainfall 495 mm 634 mm 1,036 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 3 mm 32 mm 50 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 41 research-grade observations of Narcissus obsoletus 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 28 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.

  • Hermione aequilimba Herb.
  • Hermione autumnalis (Link) M.Roem.
  • Hermione deficiens (Herb.) Kunth
  • Hermione elegans Haw.
  • Hermione obsoleta Haw.
  • Hermione tangieri Pritz.
  • Narcissus aequilimbus Nyman
  • Narcissus autumnalis Link
  • Narcissus autumnalis subsp. obsoletus (Haw.) K.Richt.
  • Narcissus cupanianus Grech
  • Narcissus cupanianus Guss.
  • Narcissus deficiens Herb.
  • Narcissus elegans (Haw.) Spach
  • Narcissus elegans f. auranticoronatus Maire
  • Narcissus elegans var. fallax Font Quer
  • Narcissus elegans var. flavescens Maire
  • Narcissus elegans var. obsoletus (Haw.) Benth.
  • Narcissus elegans var. oxypetalus (Boiss.) Maire
  • Narcissus elegans var. uniflorus Lojac.
  • Narcissus malacitanus Fern.Casas
  • Narcissus oxypetalus Boiss.
  • Narcissus serotinus Salzm. ex Schousb.
  • Narcissus serotinus subsp. deficiens (Herb.) K.Richt.
  • Narcissus serotinus var. aequilimbus (Herb.) Nyman

and 4 more.

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.