Onopordum illyricum (Illyrian cottonthistle)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Onopordum illyricum, photographed by Marco Mussita — fig. a Marco Mussita, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-19 / obs. 198834047

Onopordum illyricum, photographed by Sara Navarro — fig. b Sara Navarro, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 170717945

Onopordum illyricum, photographed by David Delon — fig. c David Delon, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 136812943

Onopordum illyricum, photographed by Davide Puddu — fig. d Davide Puddu, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 118036339

Onopordum illyricum, photographed by Bastien Alegot — fig. e Bastien Alegot, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 113357444

Onopordum illyricum, photographed by Pieter Huybrechts — fig. g Pieter Huybrechts, CC0 1.0 / obs. 41565622

Onopordum illyricum, photographed by Emanuele Santarelli — fig. h Emanuele Santarelli, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 32728953

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 Onopordum illyricum, 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
Baleares	BAL
Bulgaria	BUL
Corse	COR
France	FRA
Greece	GRC
Italy	ITA
Kriti	KRI
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Portugal	POR
Romania	ROM
Sardegna	SAR
Sicilia	SIC
Spain	SPA
East Aegean Is.	EAI	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Iran	IRN
Iraq	IRQ
Lebanon-Syria	LBS
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 169 in flower of 294 examined

25%

82%

89%

14%

33%

Proportion of examined Onopordum illyricum in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	3	too few examined
Feb	0	5	0%	0% to 43%
Mar	0	4	too few examined
Apr	1	24	4%	1% to 20%
May	14	56	25%	16% to 38%
Jun	118	144	82%	75% to 87%
Jul	32	36	89%	75% to 96%
Aug	1	7	14%	3% to 51%
Sep	0	4	too few examined
Oct	0	2	too few examined
Nov	1	3	too few examined
Dec	2	6	33%	10% to 70%

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Onopordum illyricum 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. 169 of 294 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 1,043 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-1.7 °C	1.2 °C	9.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	24.0 °C	29.4 °C	32.2 °C
Annual rainfall	445 mm	650 mm	1,310 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	21 mm	62 mm	182 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 1,043 research-grade observations of Onopordum illyricum 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 6 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.

Carduus illyricus Baill.
Onopordum arabicum L.
Onopordum cardunculus (Boiss.) Beauverd
Onopordum delortii Timb.-Lagr.
Onopordum illyricum subsp. delortii (Timb.-Lagr.) Arènes
Onopordum spectabile Rouy

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.