Rhamnus alaternus (Mediterranean Buckthorn)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Rhamnus alaternus, photographed by Daniela Costa — fig. a Daniela Costa, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-21 / obs. 199439585

Rhamnus alaternus, photographed by Marc Riera — fig. b Marc Riera, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 199166258

Rhamnus alaternus, photographed by Juan José de Haro — fig. c Juan José de Haro, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 198334997

Rhamnus alaternus, photographed by Duarte Frade — fig. d Duarte Frade, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 195623501

Rhamnus alaternus, photographed by Jacqueline Jeanne — fig. e Jacqueline Jeanne, CC0 1.0 / obs. 195720664

Rhamnus alaternus, photographed by Jon Sullivan — fig. g Jon Sullivan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 195826918

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 20 botanical countries

Native distribution of Rhamnus alaternus, 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
Albania	ALB	EUROPE
Baleares	BAL
Corse	COR
France	FRA
Greece	GRC
Italy	ITA
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Portugal	POR
Sardegna	SAR
Sicilia	SIC
Spain	SPA
Cyprus	CYP	ASIA-TEMPERATE
East Aegean Is.	EAI
Lebanon-Syria	LBS
Palestine	PAL
Türkiye	TUR
Algeria	ALG	AFRICA
Libya	LBY
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 541 in flower of 1,857 examined

21%

64%

84%

27%

14%

34%

21%

Proportion of examined Rhamnus alaternus in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	22	103	21%	15% to 30%
Feb	116	182	64%	57% to 70%
Mar	241	286	84%	80% to 88%
Apr	65	243	27%	22% to 33%
May	9	294	3%	2% to 6%
Jun	5	185	3%	1% to 6%
Jul	19	135	14%	9% to 21%
Aug	37	109	34%	26% to 43%
Sep	18	85	21%	14% to 31%
Oct	1	69	1%	0% to 8%
Nov	0	70	0%	0% to 5%
Dec	8	96	8%	4% to 16%

Peak flowering in Mar. Each bar is the share of Rhamnus alaternus 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. 541 of 1,857 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 2,043 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	0.1 °C	5.2 °C	10.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	21.2 °C	26.9 °C	31.7 °C
Annual rainfall	472 mm	732 mm	1,245 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	16 mm	83 mm	216 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 2,043 research-grade observations of Rhamnus alaternus 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 23 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.

Alaternus angustifolia Mill.
Alaternus balearica Duhamel ex Steud.
Alaternus glabra Mill.
Alaternus hispanicus hort. ex Steud.
Alaternus integrifolius Raf.
Alaternus lanceolatus Raf.
Alaternus latifolia Mill.
Alaternus ovatus Raf.
Alaternus phylica Mill.
Alaternus rotundifolia hort. ex Steud.
Alaternus variegata hort. ex Steud.
Rhamnus alaternus var. angustifolia DC.
Rhamnus alaternus var. hispanica DC.
Rhamnus alaternus var. vulgaris DC.
Rhamnus clusii Willd.
Rhamnus coriacea Buch
Rhamnus hispanica hort. ex K.Koch
Rhamnus jacobi-salvadorii O.Bolòs & Vigo
Rhamnus pendula Pamp.
Rhamnus philyca Bubani
Rhamnus picenensis Duval-Jouve
Rhamnus racemosa Duhamel
Rhamnus tripolitana Engl.

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.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.