Ranunculus ophioglossifoliusVill.

Adder's-tongue Spearwort

WFO wfo-0000462930 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 7 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 7 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Ranunculus ophioglossifolius, photographed by Alessia Guggisberg
fig. a Alessia Guggisberg, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-04-19 / obs. 189302998

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
04766480
Filed as
Ranunculus ophioglossifolius Vill.
Det. by
not recorded on this sheet
Collected
P. Font Quer 1930-05-20
Origin
MA
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 30 botanical countries

Regions where Ranunculus ophioglossifolius is native: Algeria, Canary Is., Morocco, Tunisia, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon-Syria, North Caucasus, Transcaucasus, Türkiye, Albania, Baleares, Bulgaria, Corse, France, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Kriti, Krym, NW. Balkan Pen., Portugal, Romania, Sardegna, Sicilia, Spain, Sweden, Türkiye-in-Europe, Ukraine AlgeriaMoroccoTunisiaIranIraqLebanon-SyriaNorth CaucasusTranscaucasusTürkiyeAlbaniaBulgariaCorseFranceGreeceHungaryItalyKritiKrymNW. Balkan Pen.PortugalRomaniaSiciliaSpainSwedenTürkiye-in-EuropeUkraine Canary Is.BalearesSardegna
Native distribution of Ranunculus ophioglossifolius, 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
Baleares BAL
Bulgaria BUL
Corse COR
France FRA
Great Britain GRB
Greece GRC
Hungary HUN
Italy ITA
Kriti KRI
Krym KRY
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Portugal POR
Romania ROM
Sardegna SAR
Sicilia SIC
Spain SPA
Sweden SWE
Türkiye-in-Europe TUE
Ukraine UKR
Iran IRN ASIA-TEMPERATE
Iraq IRQ
Lebanon-Syria LBS
North Caucasus NCS
Transcaucasus TCS
Türkiye TUR
Algeria ALG AFRICA
Canary Is. CNY
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 43 in flower of 48 examined

Proportion of examined Ranunculus ophioglossifolius in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 0 too few examined
Feb 1 5 20% 4% to 62%
Mar 1 2 too few examined
Apr 22 22 100% 85% to 100%
May 15 15 100% 80% to 100%
Jun 4 4 too few examined
Jul 0 0 too few examined
Aug 0 0 too few examined
Sep 0 0 too few examined
Oct 0 0 too few examined
Nov 0 0 too few examined
Dec 0 0 too few examined

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Ranunculus ophioglossifolius 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. 43 of 48 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 9 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 150 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 0.2 °C 5.2 °C 9.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 22.6 °C 26.7 °C 31.1 °C
Annual rainfall 566 mm 857 mm 1,944 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 18 mm 98 mm 249 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 150 research-grade observations of Ranunculus ophioglossifolius 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 12 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.

  • Glossophyllum ophioglossifolium Fourr.
  • Myosurus minimus subsp. minimus
  • Myosurus minimus var. minimus
  • Myosurus sessilis subsp. alopecuroides (Greene) D.E.Stone
  • Ranunculus cordifolius Bastard
  • Ranunculus depressus Georgi
  • Ranunculus fistulosus Brign.
  • Ranunculus minimus hort. ex Schltdl.
  • Ranunculus myosurus Afzel.
  • Ranunculus oppositifolius Kanitz
  • Ranunculus tauricus Pall.
  • Ranunculus uliginosus Willd.

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.