Orobanche gracilis

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Orobanche gracilis, photographed by Tobias Schönberg — fig. c Tobias Schönberg, CC0 1.0 / obs. 201079689

Orobanche gracilis, photographed by Elias — fig. d Elias, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 200187890

Orobanche gracilis, photographed by Michael Knapp — fig. e Michael Knapp, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 156535887

Orobanche gracilis, photographed by Christian Oudot — fig. f Christian Oudot, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 135558239

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 26 botanical countries

Native distribution of Orobanche gracilis, 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
Austria	AUT
Baleares	BAL
Bulgaria	BUL
Corse	COR
Czechia-Slovakia	CZE
France	FRA
Germany	GER
Greece	GRC
Hungary	HUN
Italy	ITA
Kriti	KRI
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Portugal	POR
Romania	ROM
Sardegna	SAR
Sicilia	SIC
Spain	SPA
Switzerland	SWI
Ukraine	UKR
Algeria	ALG	AFRICA
Morocco	MOR
Tunisia	TUN
North Caucasus	NCS	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Transcaucasus	TCS
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 356 in flower of 367 examined

89%

100%

95%

98%

100%

Proportion of examined Orobanche gracilis in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	1	1	too few examined
Feb	1	1	too few examined
Mar	8	9	89%	56% to 98%
Apr	24	24	100%	86% to 100%
May	104	109	95%	90% to 98%
Jun	120	123	98%	93% to 99%
Jul	55	56	98%	91% to 100%
Aug	21	21	100%	85% to 100%
Sep	20	20	100%	84% to 100%
Oct	2	2	too few examined
Nov	0	1	too few examined
Dec	0	0	too few examined

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Orobanche gracilis 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. 356 of 367 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 1,976 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-12.1 °C	-4.0 °C	4.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	16.7 °C	23.5 °C	29.5 °C
Annual rainfall	581 mm	1,068 mm	1,926 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	54 mm	163 mm	351 mm

It is found where winters bring hard 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 1,976 research-grade observations of Orobanche gracilis 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 43 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.

Catodiacrum cruentum (Bertol.) Dulac
Orobanche austrohispanica M.J.Y.Foley
Orobanche breviflora F.W.Schultz
Orobanche caryophyllacea F.W.Schultz
Orobanche condensata Ball
Orobanche congesta Rchb.f.
Orobanche cruenta Bertol.
Orobanche cruenta subsp. gracilis (Sm.) Arcang.
Orobanche cruenta subsp. noeana Nyman
Orobanche cruenta var. citrina Coss. & Germ.
Orobanche cruenta var. glabra Willk.
Orobanche cruenta var. ulicis (Des Moul.) Reut.
Orobanche cruenta var. wierzbickii (F.W.Schultz) F.W.Schmidt
Orobanche dorycnii-suffruticosi F.W.Schultz
Orobanche foetida Lapeyr.
Orobanche galeopsiflora Zumagl.
Orobanche genistae-cinereae F.W.Schultz
Orobanche genistae-germanicae F.W.Schultz
Orobanche genistae-tinctoriae F.W.Schultz
Orobanche gracilis f. psilantha Beck
Orobanche gracilis var. citrina (Coss. & Germ.) Rouy
Orobanche gracilis var. deludens (Beck) A.Pujadas
Orobanche gracilis var. lutescens Hoffmanns. & Link
Orobanche gracilis var. psilantha (Beck) O.Bolòs & Vigo

and 19 more.

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.
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.