Sarcopoterium spinosum

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Sarcopoterium spinosum, photographed by Andre Hosper — fig. c Andre Hosper, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 195516079

Sarcopoterium spinosum, photographed by TOUROULT Julien — fig. d TOUROULT Julien, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 197589062

Sarcopoterium spinosum, photographed by John Lyden — fig. e John Lyden, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 186066170

Sarcopoterium spinosum, photographed by Mitch Van Dyke — fig. f Mitch Van Dyke, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 185069862

Sarcopoterium spinosum, photographed by Grzegorz Grzejszczak — fig. h Grzegorz Grzejszczak, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 201939723

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 15 botanical countries

Native distribution of Sarcopoterium spinosum, 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
Greece	GRC
Italy	ITA
Kriti	KRI
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Sardegna	SAR
Sicilia	SIC
Türkiye-in-Europe	TUE
Cyprus	CYP	ASIA-TEMPERATE
East Aegean Is.	EAI
Lebanon-Syria	LBS
Palestine	PAL
Türkiye	TUR
Libya	LBY	AFRICA
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 46 in flower of 235 examined

19%

47%

43%

10%

17%

Proportion of examined Sarcopoterium spinosum in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	1	24	4%	1% to 20%
Feb	6	32	19%	9% to 35%
Mar	20	43	47%	33% to 61%
Apr	15	35	43%	28% to 59%
May	2	21	10%	3% to 29%
Jun	1	11	9%	2% to 38%
Jul	0	14	0%	0% to 22%
Aug	1	6	17%	3% to 56%
Sep	0	9	0%	0% to 30%
Oct	0	15	0%	0% to 20%
Nov	0	10	0%	0% to 28%
Dec	0	15	0%	0% to 20%

Peak flowering in Mar. Each bar is the share of Sarcopoterium spinosum 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. 46 of 235 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 1,789 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	2.3 °C	8.4 °C	12.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	24.5 °C	28.5 °C	33.3 °C
Annual rainfall	388 mm	646 mm	1,158 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	2 mm	7 mm	69 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 1,789 research-grade observations of Sarcopoterium spinosum 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 6 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.

Bencomia spinosa (L.) G.Nicholson
Pimpinella spinosa Gaertn.
Poterium spinosum L.
Poterium spinosum var. crispum DC.
Poterium spinosum var. inerme DC.
Sanguisorba spinosa (L.) Bertol.

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.
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.