Reichardia tingitana(L.) Roth

false sowthistle

WFO wfo-0000076650 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Reichardia tingitana, photographed by Kym Nicolson
fig. a Kym Nicolson, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-02 / obs. 194251563

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
Smithsonian, US National Herbarium
Accession
US 2656625
Filed as
Reichardia tingitana (L.) Roth
Det. by
Wagner, W. L., (BOT), Smithsonian Institution - National Museum of Natural History (UNITED STATES)
Collected
S. Furmidge 1933-03-25
Origin
US
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC0 1.0)

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.

Flowering 369 in flower of 385 examined

Proportion of examined Reichardia tingitana in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 13 14 93% 69% to 99%
Feb 35 40 88% 74% to 95%
Mar 57 61 93% 84% to 97%
Apr 83 84 99% 94% to 100%
May 50 50 100% 93% to 100%
Jun 11 12 92% 65% to 99%
Jul 14 14 100% 78% to 100%
Aug 10 11 91% 62% to 98%
Sep 20 21 95% 77% to 99%
Oct 33 33 100% 90% to 100%
Nov 24 25 96% 80% to 99%
Dec 19 20 95% 76% to 99%

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Reichardia tingitana 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. 369 of 385 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 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 1,959 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 3.6 °C 9.7 °C 16.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 22.5 °C 27.6 °C 33.8 °C
Annual rainfall 151 mm 353 mm 713 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 2 mm 29 mm 62 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 1,959 research-grade observations of Reichardia tingitana 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 33 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.

  • Picridium arabicum Hochst. & Steud. ex DC.
  • Picridium discolor Pomel
  • Picridium hispanicum Poir.
  • Picridium intermedium var. gracile Sch.Bip.
  • Picridium orientale DC.
  • Picridium pinnatifidum Lag.
  • Picridium saharae Pomel
  • Picridium tingitanum subsp. discolor (Pomel) Batt.
  • Picridium tingitanum var. diversifolium DC.
  • Picridium tingitanum var. hispanicum (Jacq.) Kunze
  • Picridium tingitanum var. maritimum Ball
  • Picridium tingitanum var. maroccanum Ball
  • Picridium tingitanum var. minus Boiss.
  • Picridium tingitanum var. saharae (Pomel) Batt.
  • Picridium tingitanum var. subacaule Willk.
  • Picridium tingitanum var. subintegrum Boiss.
  • Reichardia arabica Fiori
  • Reichardia discolor (Pomel) Sennen
  • Reichardia intermedia subsp. gracilis (Sch.Bip.) Rivas Mart.
  • Reichardia orientalis Hochr.
  • Reichardia picroides var. gracilis (Sch.Bip.) O.Bolòs & Vigo
  • Reichardia runcinata Moench
  • Reichardia tingitana subsp. discolor (Pomel) Maire
  • Reichardia tingitana subsp. orientalis (L.) Maire

and 9 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. USDA PLANTS Database. common name, checklist symbol RETI. public domain. Retrieved 2026-07-13.

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. It has no native range either: Kew's checklist does not cover this taxon.