Pulsatilla scherfelii

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Pulsatilla scherfelii, photographed by Grzegorz Grzejszczak — fig. b Grzegorz Grzejszczak, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 97533525

Pulsatilla scherfelii, photographed by xulescu_g — fig. f xulescu_g, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 77264263

Pulsatilla scherfelii, photographed by Jens-Christian Svenning — fig. g Jens-Christian Svenning, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 45962055

Pulsatilla scherfelii, photographed by Dag Endresen — fig. h Dag Endresen, CC0 1.0 / obs. 8444837

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 Pulsatilla scherfelii, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Austria	AUT	EUROPE
Bulgaria	BUL
Corse	COR
Czechia-Slovakia	CZE
France	FRA
Germany	GER
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Poland	POL
Romania	ROM
Ukraine	UKR

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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 458 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-15.4 °C	-12.8 °C	-5.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	11.9 °C	14.1 °C	17.8 °C
Annual rainfall	1,183 mm	1,659 mm	2,101 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	157 mm	282 mm	397 mm

It is found where winters are severely cold. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 458 research-grade observations of Pulsatilla scherfelii 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.

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.

Anemone scherfelii Ullepitsch
Preonanthus scherfelii (Ullep.) Skalický
Pulsatilla alpina subsp. alba Zämelis & Paegle
Pulsatilla alpina subsp. austriaca Aichele & Schwegler
Pulsatilla alpina var. lutescens (Šourek) I.Kucowa
Pulsatilla austriaca (Aichele & Schwegler) Landolt

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.