Pastinaca sativaL.

wild parsnip

WFO wfo-0000391752 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY In the accuracy benchmark

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Pastinaca sativa, photographed by Violet T.
fig. a Violet T., CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-07 / obs. 204474820
Pastinaca sativa, photographed by Vladimír Fuka
fig. b Vladimír Fuka, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204920166
Pastinaca sativa, photographed by Matt Pelikan
fig. c Matt Pelikan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205857673
Pastinaca sativa, photographed by CorentinD
fig. d CorentinD, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203648436
Pastinaca sativa, photographed by cgmayers
fig. e cgmayers, CC0 1.0 / obs. 204280245
Pastinaca sativa, photographed by Marina Potapova
fig. f Marina Potapova, CC0 1.0 / obs. 203208212
Pastinaca sativa, photographed by Yann Kemper
fig. g Yann Kemper, CC0 1.0 / obs. 203011693
Pastinaca sativa, photographed by Anastasia_Surkova
fig. h Anastasia_Surkova, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204187357

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 = 2,920 observations

Peak flowering in Jul, from 2,920 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 48 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.

  • Anethum pastinaca Wibel
  • Elaphoboscum sativum (L.) Rupr.
  • Elaphoboscum sativum var. sylvestre (Mill.) Rupr.
  • Pastinaca angulosa Dulac
  • Pastinaca arvensis Steud.
  • Pastinaca capensis Sond.
  • Pastinaca esculenta Salisb.
  • Pastinaca fleischmannii Hladnik
  • Pastinaca heracleoides (Boros) Kotov
  • Pastinaca insularis Rouy & E.G.Camus
  • Pastinaca insularis Calest.
  • Pastinaca latifolia Ledeb.
  • Pastinaca lutea Gilib.
  • Pastinaca opaca Bernh. ex Hornem.
  • Pastinaca pratensis (Pers.) H.Mart.
  • Pastinaca propinqua Jord. ex Boreau
  • Pastinaca sativa subsp. opaca (Bernh. ex Hornem.) Nyman
  • Pastinaca sativa subsp. pratensis (Pers.) Čelak.
  • Pastinaca sativa subsp. sylvestris Roug & Camus
  • Pastinaca sativa subsp. sylvestris (Mill.) Rouy & E.G.Camus
  • Pastinaca sativa subsp. umbrosa (Steven ex DC.) Bondarenko ex Korovina
  • Pastinaca sativa var. arvensis Pers.
  • Pastinaca sativa var. brevis Alef.
  • Pastinaca sativa var. dissecta Regel

and 24 more.

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.