Senecio ovatus (wood ragwort)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Senecio ovatus, photographed by Bin Aden — fig. a Bin Aden, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-09-13 / obs. 158345378

Senecio ovatus, photographed by Björn Sothmann — fig. b Björn Sothmann, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 155609506

Senecio ovatus, photographed by Tim Johnson — fig. c Tim Johnson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 172144189

Senecio ovatus, photographed by Wolfgang Jauch — fig. d Wolfgang Jauch, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 153439238

Senecio ovatus, photographed by Jernej Polajnar — fig. e Jernej Polajnar, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 150977720

Senecio ovatus, photographed by Norrland — fig. f Norrland, CC0 1.0 / obs. 150511849

Senecio ovatus, photographed by Marco Mussita — fig. g Marco Mussita, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 150306677

Senecio ovatus, photographed by Pavel Kacl — fig. h Pavel Kacl, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 149454921

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 17 botanical countries

Native distribution of Senecio ovatus, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Albania	ALB	EUROPE
Austria	AUT
Belgium	BGM
Bulgaria	BUL
Corse	COR
Czechia-Slovakia	CZE
France	FRA
Germany	GER
Greece	GRC
Hungary	HUN
Italy	ITA
Netherlands	NET
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Poland	POL
Romania	ROM
Switzerland	SWI
Ukraine	UKR

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 268 in flower of 307 examined

38%

90%

93%

74%

50%

Proportion of examined Senecio ovatus in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	0	too few examined
Feb	0	0	too few examined
Mar	0	0	too few examined
Apr	0	0	too few examined
May	0	4	too few examined
Jun	3	8	38%	14% to 69%
Jul	95	105	90%	83% to 95%
Aug	151	162	93%	88% to 96%
Sep	14	19	74%	51% to 88%
Oct	4	8	50%	22% to 78%
Nov	1	1	too few examined
Dec	0	0	too few examined

Peak flowering in Aug. Each bar is the share of Senecio ovatus 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. 268 of 307 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 7 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 1,982 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-12.6 °C	-6.0 °C	-1.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	15.8 °C	20.2 °C	23.6 °C
Annual rainfall	732 mm	1,204 mm	2,138 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	113 mm	219 mm	423 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 1,982 research-grade observations of Senecio ovatus 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 7 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.

Jacobaea ovata G.Gaertn., B.Mey. & Scherb.
Senecio alpestris Gaudin
Senecio fuchsii C.C.Gmel.
Senecio fuchsii subsp. fuchsii
Senecio nemorensis subsp. fuchsii (C.Gmelin) Celak
Senecio sarracenicus Minderova
Senecio stabianus Lacaita

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.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.