Plantago serraria

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Plantago serraria, photographed by Duarte Frade — fig. b Duarte Frade, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 195435459

Plantago serraria, photographed by Daniel Cahen — fig. d Daniel Cahen, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 183737310

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 10 botanical countries

Native distribution of Plantago serraria, 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
Greece	GRC	EUROPE
Italy	ITA
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Portugal	POR
Sardegna	SAR
Sicilia	SIC
Spain	SPA
Algeria	ALG	AFRICA
Morocco	MOR
Tunisia	TUN

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 32 in flower of 136 examined

13%

61%

36%

Proportion of examined Plantago serraria in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	11	0%	0% to 26%
Feb	0	16	0%	0% to 19%
Mar	4	31	13%	5% to 29%
Apr	19	31	61%	44% to 76%
May	8	22	36%	20% to 57%
Jun	0	3	too few examined
Jul	1	1	too few examined
Aug	0	0	too few examined
Sep	0	0	too few examined
Oct	0	2	too few examined
Nov	0	11	0%	0% to 26%
Dec	0	8	0%	0% to 32%

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Plantago serraria 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. 32 of 136 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 572 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	2.0 °C	9.0 °C	12.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	20.7 °C	26.8 °C	33.3 °C
Annual rainfall	517 mm	714 mm	1,038 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	12 mm	22 mm	68 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 572 research-grade observations of Plantago serraria 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 8 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.

Plantago bulbosa Crantz
Plantago coronopus var. serraria (L.) Kuntze
Plantago gracilis Poir.
Plantago serraria f. angustifolia Sennen
Plantago serraria var. africana Barnéoud
Plantago serraria var. angustifolia Sennen
Plantago serraria var. hispanica Decne.
Plantago serraria var. microdon Pilg.

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.