Rhamnus catharticaL.

common buckthorn

WFO wfo-0000460239 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Rhamnus cathartica, photographed by Jason Grant
fig. a Jason Grant, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-11 / obs. 205217595
Rhamnus cathartica, photographed by Ryan Sorrells
fig. b Ryan Sorrells, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203401869
Rhamnus cathartica, photographed by Eric Schmidt
fig. c Eric Schmidt, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205031094
Rhamnus cathartica, photographed by Howard Williams
fig. d Howard Williams, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 199153788
Rhamnus cathartica, photographed by Eric Schmidt
fig. e Eric Schmidt, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205028001
Rhamnus cathartica, photographed by Ethan Rose
fig. f Ethan Rose, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204960936
Rhamnus cathartica, photographed by Alan Prather
fig. g Alan Prather, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 201938131
Rhamnus cathartica, photographed by Ian Whyte
fig. h Ian Whyte, CC0 1.0 / obs. 201095299

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.

Flowering n = 564 observations

Peak flowering in May, from 564 community-annotated observations worldwide. This is a global aggregate, not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres, and citizen-science records cluster near cities, at weekends, and in spring. Where a species has fewer than 30 annotated records we do not draw this chart at all.

Also published as 10 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.

  • Cervispina cathartica (L.) Moench
  • Rhamnus cadevalli Pau
  • Rhamnus elbursensis Gauba & Rech.f.
  • Rhamnus hydriensis Hacq.
  • Rhamnus sylvatica J.Serres
  • Rhamnus wichellii hort. ex K.Koch
  • Rhamnus wicklia hort. ex K.Koch
  • Rhamnus wihhor Luce
  • Rhamnus willdenowiana Roem. & Schult.
  • Rhamnus xanthocarpa hort. ex K.Koch

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.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice, no toxicity claim and no native range, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.