Aralia spinosaL.

devil's walkingstick

WFO wfo-0000259375 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Aralia spinosa, photographed by Laura Gaudette
fig. a Laura Gaudette, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-20 / obs. 199152350

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 = 207 observations

Flowering observations of Aralia spinosa by month
MonthObservations
Jan0
Feb0
Mar0
Apr1
May0
Jun9
Jul81
Aug106
Sep8
Oct2
Nov0
Dec0

Peak flowering in Aug, from 207 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 8 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 georgica Miq.
  • Aralia leroana K.Koch
  • Aralia spinosa f. subinermis Moldenke
  • Aralia spinosa var. glabra Nutt.
  • Aralia spinosa var. inermis Pursh
  • Aralia spinosa var. subinermis K.Koch
  • Chaerophyllum arborescens L.
  • Myrrhis arborescens Spreng.

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.