Saponaria officinalisL.

common soapwort

WFO wfo-0000438211 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Saponaria officinalis, photographed by Pete Bradshaw
fig. a Pete Bradshaw, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-09 / obs. 204824719

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 = 5,599 observations

Flowering observations of Saponaria officinalis by month
MonthObservations
Jan16
Feb9
Mar15
Apr11
May15
Jun508
Jul2217
Aug1561
Sep804
Oct369
Nov66
Dec8

Peak flowering in Jul, from 5,599 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 5 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.

  • Bootia saponaria Neck.
  • Bootia vulgaris Neck.
  • Lychnis officinalis Scop.
  • Saponaria officinalis var. puberula Syme ex Rouy & Foucaud
  • Silene saponaria Fries ex Willk. & Lange

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.