Squilla numidicaJord. & Fourr.

WFO wfo-0000738357 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Squilla numidica, photographed by Niko Ioannidis
fig. a Niko Ioannidis, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-12 / obs. 205463864
Squilla numidica, photographed by Andre Hosper
fig. b Andre Hosper, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 195647147
Squilla numidica, photographed by Andre Hosper
fig. c Andre Hosper, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 197629646
Squilla numidica, photographed by Mehdi Chetibi
fig. d Mehdi Chetibi, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 185245750
Squilla numidica, photographed by Mehdi Chetibi
fig. e Mehdi Chetibi, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 185218970
Squilla numidica, photographed by Mehdi Chetibi
fig. f Mehdi Chetibi, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 185186503
Squilla numidica, photographed by Grzegorz Grzejszczak
fig. g Grzegorz Grzejszczak, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 195656347
Squilla numidica, photographed by Mehdi Chetibi
fig. h Mehdi Chetibi, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 182423050

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 11 botanical countries

Regions where Squilla numidica is native: Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Albania, Baleares, Greece, Italy, Kriti, NW. Balkan Pen., Sicilia AlgeriaLibyaMoroccoTunisiaAlbaniaGreeceItalyKritiNW. Balkan Pen.Sicilia Baleares
Native distribution of Squilla numidica, 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
Albania ALB EUROPE
Baleares BAL
Greece GRC
Italy ITA
Kriti KRI
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Sicilia SIC
Algeria ALG AFRICA
Libya LBY
Morocco MOR
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 235 in flower of 395 examined

Peak flowering in Sep. Each bar is the share of Squilla numidica 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. 235 of 395 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 2 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 960 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 1.1 °C 7.9 °C 11.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 24.1 °C 28.8 °C 33.7 °C
Annual rainfall 386 mm 645 mm 1,062 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 2 mm 18 mm 52 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 960 research-grade observations of Squilla numidica 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.

  • Charybdis numidica (Jord. & Fourr.) Speta
  • Drimia numidica (Jord. & Fourr.) J.C.Manning & Goldblatt
  • Squilla sphaeroidea Jord. & Fourr.
  • Urginea maritima var. numidica (Jord. & Fourr.) Maire & Weiller
  • Urginea maritima var. sphaeroidea (Jord. & Fourr.) Maire & Weiller
  • Urginea numidica (Jord. & Fourr.) Grey
  • Urginea sphaeroidea (Jord. & Fourr.) Grey

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.