- Plants
- ›Vascular Plants
- ›flowering plants
- ›Dicots
- ›Legumes, Milkworts, and Allies
- ›Legumes
- ›Faboideae
- ›Trifolieae
- ›Ononis
Spiny restharrow
Ononis spinosa
Ononis spinosa is a flowering plant belonging to the family Fabaceae, that is commonly known as spiny restharrow or just restharrow. It is found throughout much of Europe including Britain, but rarely as far north as Scotland. It is closely related to Ononis repens (common restharrow); the two are considered conspecific by the Plants of the World Online database, with O. repens treated as a subspecies of O. spinosa as Ononis spinosa subsp. procurrens. The Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland treats them as separate species.
From the article Ononis spinosa on Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), quoted section by section
Description
Spiny restharrow is an upright, bushy perennial. The wiry, branched stem is downy and nearly always spiny and grows to a height of 60 cm (24 in). The leaves are small, dark green, oval or trifoliate, with toothed leaf-like stipules at their base. The flowers are deep pink and white, with the wing (side) petals shorter than the hooked keel petal (unlike O. repens, where the wings are as long as the keel), and the calyx usually shorter than the pod.
Range & habitat
Spiny restharrow is found in southern temperate areas of Europe and Siberia. In Great Britain, it has a more southeasterly distribution than O. repens, occurring widely in central and southeastern England, scarce in Wales and southwestern and northern England, and only at a very few sites in the south of Scotland. It is not native in Ireland, only found there as a rare introduced plant. Its typical habitat is lime-rich, but nutrient-poor grassland on chalk and heavy, calcareous soils.
Wikipedia: “Distribution and habitat”
Where it lives
Recorded sightings
—
geo-referenced records in GBIF, from museums, herbaria and field observers.
Drag the globe to turn it. Dots are where records exist, not a range map; darker means more records.
In the old herbals & bestiaries
Book of Herbs
Hieronymus Bock (Tragus) · 1546 · p.689
Herbarium Portatile, Oder Behendes Kräuter- und Gewächs-Buch: Darinn nicht allein 1363. so wol Einheimische als Außländndische Kräuter mit Lateinisch und Deutscher Benennung abgebildet, sondern auch die meisten, so in der Medicin gebräuchlich, kürtzlich erkläret werden
Panckow, Thomas · 1656 · p.109
In the stacks
Searching the stacks…
Every page naming Ononis spinosa in the Biodiversity Heritage Library →
This page is assembled live from iNaturalist, GBIF, Wikipedia, the Source Library and the Internet Archive. It is not yet part of the hand-edited codex. iNaturalist taxon 82730.