Serapias parviflora (Small-flowered serapias)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Serapias parviflora, photographed by Quentin Groom — fig. a Quentin Groom, CC0 1.0 / 2022-05-15 / obs. 197841961

Serapias parviflora, photographed by Ricardo Lima — fig. b Ricardo Lima, CC0 1.0 / obs. 204061463

Serapias parviflora, photographed by Julia Moning — fig. c Julia Moning, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 167699672

Serapias parviflora, photographed by Duarte Frade — fig. d Duarte Frade, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 160989468

Serapias parviflora, photographed by Eleftherios Katsillis — fig. e Eleftherios Katsillis, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 121037354

Serapias parviflora, photographed by amantedarmanin — fig. f amantedarmanin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 118749106

Serapias parviflora, photographed by João Gonçalves — fig. h João Gonçalves, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 111462815

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 20 botanical countries

Native distribution of Serapias parviflora, 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
Baleares	BAL
Corse	COR
France	FRA
Greece	GRC
Italy	ITA
Kriti	KRI
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Portugal	POR
Sardegna	SAR
Sicilia	SIC
Spain	SPA
Türkiye-in-Europe	TUE
Algeria	ALG	AFRICA
Azores	AZO
Canary Is.	CNY
Morocco	MOR
Tunisia	TUN
Cyprus	CYP	ASIA-TEMPERATE
East Aegean Is.	EAI

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 454 in flower of 482 examined

82%

97%

95%

62%

Proportion of examined Serapias parviflora in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	0	too few examined
Feb	0	0	too few examined
Mar	14	17	82%	59% to 94%
Apr	269	278	97%	94% to 98%
May	163	171	95%	91% to 98%
Jun	8	13	62%	36% to 82%
Jul	0	0	too few examined
Aug	0	0	too few examined
Sep	0	2	too few examined
Oct	0	0	too few examined
Nov	0	0	too few examined
Dec	0	1	too few examined

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Serapias parviflora 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. 454 of 482 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 8 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 1,990 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	1.2 °C	6.9 °C	10.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	21.1 °C	26.2 °C	32.2 °C
Annual rainfall	535 mm	746 mm	1,359 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	16 mm	42 mm	171 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 1,990 research-grade observations of Serapias parviflora 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 21 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.

Serapias columnae Aurnier
Serapias elongata Tod.
Serapias laxiflora Rchb.f.
Serapias laxiflora var. parviflora (Parl.) Rchb.f.
Serapias lingua subsp. occultata (J.Gay ex Cavalier) Bonnier & Layens
Serapias lingua var. parviflora (Parl.) Kraenzl.
Serapias longipetala var. parviflora (Parl.) Lindl.
Serapias mascaensis H.Kretzschmar, G.Kretzschmar & Kreutz
Serapias occultata J.Gay ex Cavalier
Serapias occultata J.Gay
Serapias occultata f. albiflora E.G.Camus
Serapias occultata f. knochei E.G.Camus
Serapias occultata var. parviflora (Parl.) Willk.
Serapias parviflora f. albiflora (E.G.Camus) Soó
Serapias parviflora f. knochei (E.G.Camus) Soó
Serapias parviflora f. lutescens Renz
Serapias parviflora f. sulphurea Lanza ex G.Keller
Serapias parviflora subsp. mascaensis (H.Kretzschmar, G.Kretzschmar & Kreutz) Kreutz
Serapias parviflora subsp. occultata (J.Gay ex Cavalier) Maire & Weiller
Serapias parviflora var. lutescens (Renz) Kalop.
Serapiastrum parviflorum (Parl.) A.A.Eaton

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.