Ribes alpinumL.

Mountain Currantalpine currantmountain currant

WFO wfo-0000404909 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Ribes alpinum, photographed by Vesa Oikonen
fig. a Vesa Oikonen, CC0 1.0 / 2022-05-19 / obs. 200022749

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
3768833
Filed as
Ribes alpinum L.
Det. by
not recorded on this sheet
Collected
not recorded
Origin
not recorded
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 29 botanical countries

Regions where Ribes alpinum is native: Morocco, Iran, North Caucasus, Transcaucasus, Türkiye, Albania, Austria, Baltic States, Belarus, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechia-Slovakia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Northwest European Russia, Norway, NW. Balkan Pen., Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine MoroccoIranNorth CaucasusTranscaucasusTürkiyeAlbaniaAustriaBaltic StatesBelarusBelgiumBulgariaCzechia-SlovakiaDenmarkFinlandFranceGermanyGreeceHungaryItalyNorthwest European RussiaNorwayNW. Balkan Pen.PolandRomaniaSpainSwedenSwitzerlandUkraine
Native distribution of Ribes alpinum, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Albania ALB EUROPE
Austria AUT
Baltic States BLT
Belarus BLR
Belgium BGM
Bulgaria BUL
Czechia-Slovakia CZE
Denmark DEN
Finland FIN
France FRA
Germany GER
Great Britain GRB
Greece GRC
Hungary HUN
Italy ITA
Northwest European Russia RUW
Norway NOR
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Poland POL
Romania ROM
Spain SPA
Sweden SWE
Switzerland SWI
Ukraine UKR
Iran IRN ASIA-TEMPERATE
North Caucasus NCS
Transcaucasus TCS
Türkiye TUR
Morocco MOR AFRICA

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 83 in flower of 212 examined

Proportion of examined Ribes alpinum in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 0 too few examined
Feb 0 0 too few examined
Mar 5 9 56% 27% to 81%
Apr 27 32 84% 68% to 93%
May 47 56 84% 72% to 91%
Jun 3 19 16% 6% to 38%
Jul 1 44 2% 0% to 12%
Aug 0 39 0% 0% to 9%
Sep 0 5 0% 0% to 43%
Oct 0 6 0% 0% to 39%
Nov 0 2 too few examined
Dec 0 0 too few examined

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Ribes alpinum 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. 83 of 212 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 4 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 1,925 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -11.0 °C -6.4 °C -0.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 17.4 °C 21.2 °C 24.7 °C
Annual rainfall 551 mm 721 mm 1,632 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 83 mm 115 mm 312 mm

It is found where winters bring hard frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,925 research-grade observations of Ribes alpinum 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 36 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.

  • Grossularia alpestris Bubani
  • Grossularia insipida Rupr.
  • Liebichia alpina (L.) Opiz
  • Liebichia gottsteinii Opiz
  • Ribes album Gilib.
  • Ribes alpinum f. aureum (Van Geert) Rehder
  • Ribes alpinum f. laciniatum (G.Kirchn.) Rehder
  • Ribes alpinum f. pumilum (Lindl.) Rehder
  • Ribes alpinum subsp. lucidum (Kit.) Soják
  • Ribes alpinum subsp. lucidum (Kit.) Jasicová
  • Ribes alpinum unranked aureum Van Geert
  • Ribes alpinum var. bacciferum Wallr.
  • Ribes alpinum var. dioicum Gray
  • Ribes alpinum var. laciniatum G.Kirchn.
  • Ribes alpinum var. parvifolium Regel
  • Ribes alpinum var. pilosum Regel
  • Ribes alpinum var. pumilum Lindl.
  • Ribes alpinum var. sterile Wallr.
  • Ribes alpinum var. subglabrum Regel
  • Ribes bacciferum K.Koch
  • Ribes dioicum Moench
  • Ribes grossulariifolium Rchb. ex K.Koch
  • Ribes hladnikii Rchb. ex Nyman
  • Ribes humile Dippel

and 12 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. 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.