Phyteuma orbiculareL.

WFO wfo-0000817419 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Phyteuma orbiculare, photographed by Andreas Stiller
fig. a Andreas Stiller, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-12 / obs. 205446067

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
3749743
Filed as
Phyteuma orbiculare L.
Det. by
not recorded on this sheet
Collected
not recorded
Origin
not recorded
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 19 botanical countries

Regions where Phyteuma orbiculare is native: Albania, Austria, Baltic States, Belarus, Belgium, Czechia-Slovakia, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Northwest European Russia, NW. Balkan Pen., Poland, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine AlbaniaAustriaBaltic StatesBelarusBelgiumCzechia-SlovakiaFranceGermanyGreeceHungaryItalyNorthwest European RussiaNW. Balkan Pen.PolandRomaniaSpainSwitzerlandUkraine
Native distribution of Phyteuma orbiculare, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Albania ALB EUROPE
Austria AUT
Baltic States BLT
Belarus BLR
Belgium BGM
Czechia-Slovakia CZE
France FRA
Germany GER
Great Britain GRB
Greece GRC
Hungary HUN
Italy ITA
Northwest European Russia RUW
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Poland POL
Romania ROM
Spain SPA
Switzerland SWI
Ukraine UKR

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 539 in flower of 559 examined

Proportion of examined Phyteuma orbiculare in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 0 too few examined
Feb 0 0 too few examined
Mar 0 0 too few examined
Apr 13 16 81% 57% to 93%
May 142 150 95% 90% to 97%
Jun 204 209 98% 95% to 99%
Jul 141 144 98% 94% to 99%
Aug 32 33 97% 85% to 99%
Sep 6 6 100% 61% to 100%
Oct 0 0 too few examined
Nov 1 1 too few examined
Dec 0 0 too few examined

Peak flowering in Sep. Each bar is the share of Phyteuma orbiculare 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. 539 of 559 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 2,008 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -15.0 °C -8.4 °C 1.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 14.0 °C 18.9 °C 24.8 °C
Annual rainfall 722 mm 1,360 mm 2,381 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 118 mm 224 mm 444 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 2,008 research-grade observations of Phyteuma orbiculare 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 97 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.

  • Phyteuma angustatum Wender.
  • Phyteuma austriacum Beck
  • Phyteuma austriacum var. vestitum Murr
  • Phyteuma bovelinii Hegetschw.
  • Phyteuma brevifolium Schleich.
  • Phyteuma cordifolium Vill.
  • Phyteuma corsicum Sieber ex Rochel
  • Phyteuma delphinense (Rich.Schulz) Dalla Torre & Sarnth.
  • Phyteuma delphinense f. alpestre (Rich.Schulz) Dalla Torre & Sarnth.
  • Phyteuma delphinense f. hispidum (Hegetschw. ex Rich.Schulz) Dalla Torre & Sarnth.
  • Phyteuma delphinense var. vestitum (Murr) Dalla Torre & Sarnth.
  • Phyteuma ellipticifolium Vill.
  • Phyteuma ellipticifolium var. pauciflorum Hegetschw.
  • Phyteuma eynense (Sennen) Sennen
  • Phyteuma fistulosum Rchb.
  • Phyteuma hispanicum Rich.Schulz
  • Phyteuma hispidum Hegetschw.
  • Phyteuma inaequatum Kit. ex Schult.
  • Phyteuma lanceolatum Vill.
  • Phyteuma longifolium Hegetschw.
  • Phyteuma michelii Hegetschw.
  • Phyteuma montanum (Rich.Schulz) Dalla Torre & Sarnth.
  • Phyteuma montanum var. exinvolucratum (Rich.Schulz) Dalla Torre & Sarnth.
  • Phyteuma montanum var. suffultum (Rich.Schulz) Dalla Torre & Sarnth.

and 73 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.