Oenanthe crocataL.

Hemlock Water-dropwort

WFO wfo-0000385433 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Oenanthe crocata, photographed by agujaceratops
fig. a agujaceratops, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-11 / obs. 205431712
Oenanthe crocata, photographed by Anne Thomson
fig. b Anne Thomson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204760060
Oenanthe crocata, photographed by Juliad323
fig. c Juliad323, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204598938
Oenanthe crocata, photographed by David Lazarus
fig. d David Lazarus, CC0 1.0 / obs. 201847185
Oenanthe crocata, photographed by Sheelagh Halsey
fig. e Sheelagh Halsey, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 201635379
Oenanthe crocata, photographed by Ethan Lutterer
fig. f Ethan Lutterer, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 202152767
Oenanthe crocata, photographed by Pete Bradshaw
fig. g Pete Bradshaw, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 201015548
Oenanthe crocata, photographed by Stephen James McWilliam
fig. h Stephen James McWilliam, CC0 1.0 / obs. 197070527

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 12 botanical countries

Regions where Oenanthe crocata is native: Madeira, Morocco, Belgium, Corse, France, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Sardegna, Sicilia, Spain MoroccoBelgiumCorseFranceIrelandItalyPortugalSiciliaSpain MadeiraSardegna
Native distribution of Oenanthe crocata, 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
Belgium BGM EUROPE
Corse COR
France FRA
Great Britain GRB
Ireland IRE
Italy ITA
Portugal POR
Sardegna SAR
Sicilia SIC
Spain SPA
Madeira MDR AFRICA
Morocco MOR

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 142 in flower of 238 examined

Peak flowering in Jun. Each bar is the share of Oenanthe crocata 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. 142 of 238 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 5 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 1,938 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 1.3 °C 2.6 °C 6.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 16.7 °C 19.9 °C 25.7 °C
Annual rainfall 658 mm 897 mm 1,712 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 78 mm 168 mm 277 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 1,938 research-grade observations of Oenanthe crocata 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.

  • Cnidium striatum Turcz. ex Fisch. & C.A.Mey.
  • Oenanthe apiifolia Brot.
  • Oenanthe crocata f. macrosciadia (Willk.) Lange
  • Oenanthe crocata subsp. apiifolia (Brot.) Arcang.
  • Oenanthe crocata var. apiifolia (Brot.) Pérez Lara
  • Oenanthe crocata var. broteri Merino
  • Oenanthe crocata var. longissima Reduron
  • Oenanthe crocata var. macrosciadia (Willk.) Lange
  • Oenanthe crocata var. oligactis Lange
  • Oenanthe crocata var. tenuisecta Merino
  • Oenanthe divaricata (R.Br.) Mabb.
  • Oenanthe gallaecica Pau & Merino ex Merino
  • Oenanthe macrosciadia Willk.
  • Oenanthe oligactis Pau
  • Oenanthe pteridifolia Lowe
  • Phellandrium plinii Bubani
  • Selinum divaricatum R.Br.

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. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. 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.