Orchis anthropophora(L.) All.

Man orchid

WFO wfo-0000258929 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Orchis anthropophora, photographed by Eleftherios Katsillis
fig. a Eleftherios Katsillis, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-20 / obs. 199286772

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 25 botanical countries

Regions where Orchis anthropophora is native: Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Cyprus, East Aegean Is., Lebanon-Syria, Türkiye, Albania, Austria, Baleares, Belgium, Corse, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, Kriti, Netherlands, NW. Balkan Pen., Portugal, Sardegna, Sicilia, Spain, Switzerland AlgeriaMoroccoTunisiaCyprusEast Aegean Is.Lebanon-SyriaTürkiyeAlbaniaAustriaBelgiumCorseFranceGermanyGreeceItalyKritiNetherlandsNW. Balkan Pen.PortugalSiciliaSpainSwitzerland BalearesSardegna
Native distribution of Orchis anthropophora, 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
Albania ALB EUROPE
Austria AUT
Baleares BAL
Belgium BGM
Corse COR
France FRA
Germany GER
Great Britain GRB
Greece GRC
Italy ITA
Kriti KRI
Netherlands NET
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Portugal POR
Sardegna SAR
Sicilia SIC
Spain SPA
Switzerland SWI
Cyprus CYP ASIA-TEMPERATE
East Aegean Is. EAI
Lebanon-Syria LBS
Türkiye TUR
Algeria ALG AFRICA
Morocco MOR
Tunisia TUN

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 1,083 in flower of 1,128 examined

Proportion of examined Orchis anthropophora in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 0 too few examined
Feb 9 10 90% 60% to 98%
Mar 85 90 94% 88% to 98%
Apr 413 430 96% 94% to 98%
May 487 495 98% 97% to 99%
Jun 86 94 91% 84% to 96%
Jul 2 6 33% 10% to 70%
Aug 0 1 too few examined
Sep 0 0 too few examined
Oct 1 2 too few examined
Nov 0 0 too few examined
Dec 0 0 too few examined

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Orchis anthropophora 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. 1,083 of 1,128 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 6 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 1,944 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -4.7 °C 0.8 °C 8.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 20.5 °C 24.3 °C 31.1 °C
Annual rainfall 535 mm 920 mm 1,523 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 23 mm 148 mm 294 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 1,944 research-grade observations of Orchis anthropophora 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 23 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.

  • Aceras anthropomorphum (Pers.) Sm.
  • Aceras anthropophorum (L.) Sm.
  • Aceras anthropophorum (L.) W.T.Aiton
  • Aceras anthropophorum (L.) R.Br.
  • Aceras anthropophorum f. angustatum (Rouy) Maire
  • Aceras anthropophorum f. apiculatum Höppner
  • Aceras anthropophorum f. latior (Rouy) Maire
  • Aceras anthropophorum f. purpurata Balayer
  • Aceras anthropophorum lus. flavescens W.Zimm. ex Asch. & Graebn.
  • Aceras anthropophorum var. angustata Rouy
  • Aceras anthropophorum var. angustatum Rouy
  • Aceras anthropophorum var. balearicum Chodat
  • Aceras anthropophorum var. latior Rouy
  • Arachnites anthropophora (L.) F.W.Schmidt
  • Himantoglossum anthropophorum (L.) Spreng.
  • Loroglossum anthropophorum (L.) Rich.
  • Loroglossum brachyglotte Rich.
  • Ophrys anthropomorpha Willd.
  • Ophrys anthropophora L.
  • Satyrium anthropomorpha Pers.
  • Satyrium anthropomorphum Pers.
  • Satyrium anthropophora (L.) Pers.
  • Serapias anthropophora (L.) Jundz.

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.