Erodium elatum

Erodium elatum (Form.) R.T.F. Clifton This is a plant found in nurseries in the UK (and elsewhere?) This was in the rock garden at Wisley, photo taken on 10/07/2005. It was labeled simply Erodium absinthoides which means it could be any of the subspecies of absinthoides, but fits the description of E. elatum. © Benjamin Coultrup

Photos. Good reliable photos of Erodiums (except the more common species) on the internet are few and far between. You cannot just believe the names given but need to check the photos with the descriptions, and known localities for the species. The following are photos are reliable but photos of other species on the same site may not be!

Reliable photos of E. elatum can be found on a PDF - click on full text PDF to open it in Adobe Reader or Foxit Reader, and find page 176/177 for photos. They are labelled simply as Erodium absinthoides which is misleading because it could be any of the 5 subspeceis of E. absinthoides. This is why it is best to regard these as species, then you know which one is meant. We know this is E. elatum because it matches the description, and was photographed in Bulgaria – correct for this species.

Also see this page for more photos of E. elatum - click on the download link against ‘New Floristic Records in the Balkans’ to open another PDF and scroll to Page 258, this time labelled subsp balcanicum, for a paler coloured form.

Inflorescence: Flowering stems ascending with umbels of 4 to 8 pink to bluish-violet flowers, with rounded petals, flowering early, in April and May. Sepals have a long mucro of 1.5 to 2 mm. The beak is long being 4.5 to 6 cm.

Distribution: This species is found in Europe, in Bulgaria, Greece, Bosnia, Serbia and Macedonia among rocks on stony calcareous ground above 1600 m.

Erodium elatum; West Macedonia Region, Greece; April 29, 2017; photo credit: Todd Boland; from iNaturalist.org; licenced under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC 4.0)