Sonchus pinnatifidusCav.

WFO wfo-0000024536 Accepted WFO 2026-06 4 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–d · 4 separate observations

Sonchus pinnatifidus, photographed by Eric Tittley
fig. a Eric Tittley, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-04-21 / obs. 189709476
Sonchus pinnatifidus, photographed by Andre Hosper
fig. b Andre Hosper, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 59974872
Sonchus pinnatifidus, photographed by Andre Hosper
fig. c Andre Hosper, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 59856437
Sonchus pinnatifidus, photographed by Mirela
fig. d Mirela, CC0 1.0 / obs. 181294199

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 2 botanical countries

Regions where Sonchus pinnatifidus is native: Canary Is., Morocco Morocco Canary Is.
Native distribution of Sonchus pinnatifidus, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Canary Is. CNY AFRICA
Morocco MOR

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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 128 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 12.7 °C 14.8 °C 16.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 22.5 °C 23.0 °C 25.0 °C
Annual rainfall 155 mm 175 mm 191 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 3 mm 3 mm 9 mm

It is not found anywhere that gets close to freezing. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 128 research-grade observations of Sonchus pinnatifidus 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.

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.

  • Sonchus acidus Schousb.
  • Sonchus acidus Schousb. ex Willd.
  • Sonchus glaucus Willd.
  • Sonchus pinnatifidus var. integrifolius G.Kunkel
  • Sonchus runcinatus Vent. ex Sch.Bip.

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.
  3. 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.