Ruscus aculeatusL.

butcher's-broom

WFO wfo-0000732428 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Ruscus aculeatus, photographed by Elizabete Marchante
fig. a Elizabete Marchante, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-11 / obs. 205100350
Ruscus aculeatus, photographed by Pete Bradshaw
fig. b Pete Bradshaw, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204209048
Ruscus aculeatus, photographed by Elizabete Marchante
fig. c Elizabete Marchante, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203564957
Ruscus aculeatus, photographed by Andre Hosper
fig. d Andre Hosper, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203288308
Ruscus aculeatus, photographed by Murielle Desrois
fig. e Murielle Desrois, CC0 1.0 / obs. 196747984
Ruscus aculeatus, photographed by Duarte Frade
fig. f Duarte Frade, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 195452071
Ruscus aculeatus, photographed by Marc Riera
fig. g Marc Riera, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 199171467
Ruscus aculeatus, photographed by Kevin Birch
fig. h Kevin Birch, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 195145398

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 = 292 observations

Peak flowering in Mar, from 292 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 9 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.

  • Oxymyrsine pungens Bubani
  • Ruscus aculeatus f. pumilus Druce
  • Ruscus aculeatus subsp. laxus (Sm.) K.Richt.
  • Ruscus aculeatus var. angustifolius Boiss.
  • Ruscus dumosus E.D.Clarke
  • Ruscus flexuosus Mill.
  • Ruscus laxus Sm.
  • Ruscus parasiticus Gueldenst.
  • Ruscus ponticus Woronow

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.