Arctium lappaL.

greater burdock

WFO wfo-0000095986 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Arctium lappa, photographed by Jason Grant
fig. a Jason Grant, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-05 / obs. 203586027
Arctium lappa, photographed by Mark Apgar
fig. b Mark Apgar, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 199746226
Arctium lappa, photographed by Zoltán Nagy
fig. c Zoltán Nagy, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205366920
Arctium lappa, photographed by Howard Williams
fig. d Howard Williams, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 200320317
Arctium lappa, photographed by Mark Apgar
fig. e Mark Apgar, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 178485965
Arctium lappa, photographed by Natalie Waddell-Rutter
fig. f Natalie Waddell-Rutter, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 181494698
Arctium lappa, photographed by Thomas Koffel
fig. g Thomas Koffel, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 197085850
Arctium lappa, photographed by Jason Grant
fig. h Jason Grant, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 194801416

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 = 1,017 observations

Peak flowering in Jul, from 1,017 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 22 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.

  • Arcion majus Bubani
  • Arcion tomentosum Bubani
  • Arctium adhaerens Gilib.
  • Arctium bardana Willd.
  • Arctium chaorum Klokov
  • Arctium grandiflorum Desf.
  • Arctium lappa Willd.
  • Arctium lappa subsp. lappa
  • Arctium lappa subsp. majus (Gaertn.) Arènes
  • Arctium lappa var. lappa
  • Arctium leiospermum Juz. & Ye.V.Serg.
  • Arctium majus Bernh.
  • Arctium ruderale Salisb.
  • Arctium vulgare (Hill) Druce
  • Bardana arctium Hill
  • Bardana lappa Hill
  • Lappa glabra Lam.
  • Lappa major Gaertn.
  • Lappa nemorosa Körn. ex Griewank
  • Lappa officinalis All.
  • Lappa vulgaris Hill
  • Lappa vulgaris var. vulgaris

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.