Aralia nudicaulisL.

wild sarsaparilla

WFO wfo-0000258460 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Aralia nudicaulis, photographed by Renato Robert
fig. a Renato Robert, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-12 / obs. 205775997
Aralia nudicaulis, photographed by Mary E. Macaulay, P.Eng.
fig. b Mary E. Macaulay, P.Eng., CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205871028
Aralia nudicaulis, photographed by Kalvin Chan
fig. c Kalvin Chan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204963763
Aralia nudicaulis, photographed by Renato Robert
fig. d Renato Robert, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205773908
Aralia nudicaulis, photographed by Renato Robert
fig. e Renato Robert, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205775230
Aralia nudicaulis, photographed by Mary Krieger
fig. f Mary Krieger, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205023827
Aralia nudicaulis, photographed by Alexis Godin
fig. g Alexis Godin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204707978
Aralia nudicaulis, photographed by Mary Krieger
fig. h Mary Krieger, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 206028433

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.

Confused withby our own model

These are not lookalikes we guessed at. Each one is a species our identification model genuinely mistook for this plant, and how many times. The error rate is published.

Flowering n = 2,425 observations

Peak flowering in May, from 2,425 community-annotated observations worldwide. This is a global aggregate, not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres, and citizen-science records cluster near cities, at weekends, and in spring. Where a species has fewer than 30 annotated records we do not draw this chart at all.

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.

  • Aralia nudicaulis f. abortiva Dans.
  • Aralia nudicaulis f. depauperata Vict.
  • Aralia nudicaulis f. nudicaulis
  • Aralia nudicaulis f. prolifera (Apgar) Britton
  • Aralia nudicaulis f. virescens Vict. & J.Rousseau
  • Aralia nudicaulis var. elongata Nash
  • Aralia nudicaulis var. prolifera Apgar

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.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice, no toxicity claim and no native range, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.