The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Aquilegia paui is a small perennial columbine found only in the Ports de Tortosa-Beseit mountains of Catalonia, northeastern Spain. It is a rare wild species rather than a common garden plant, so it is grown mainly by specialist collectors and botanic gardens.
Aquilegia paui is a species of perennial flowering plant in the genus Aquilegia (columbines) in the family Ranunculaceae. The species has an extremely limited range, narrowly endemic only to the mountains of Ports de Tortosa-Beseit, a massif in the Province of Tarragona in Catalonia, northeastern Spain. Due to a herbarium filing error and the absence of observations of A. paui from 1920 until 1999, the species was long considered a subspecies or synonym of Aquilegia vulgaris.
Growing up to 20 cm (7.9 in) tall, the species blooms in May and June. The flowers are bluish-purple with pale or whitish petals. The species has a small population that, as of 2011, numbered about 2,000 individuals spread across four subpopulations. Human activity, predation by the native Southeastern Spanish ibex, and poor genetic diversity have been cited as risks to the continued survival of A. paui.
Despite its historical taxonomic subordination under the species Aquilegia vulgaris, substantial morphological differences distinguish the two species, notably that A. paui has fewer flowers and follicles, as well as smaller leaves. The species ranges overlap in Ports de Tortosa-Beseit. There, A. paui favors rockier areas near cliffs and away from other vegetation, while A. vulgaris populates moist, shady areas.
Aquilegia alpina · Aquilegia amaliae · Fan Columbine · Aquilegia apuana · Aquilegia aradanica · Aquilegia aragonensis · Dark Columbine · Aquilegia atrovinosa · Atwood's Columbine · Aquilegia aurea · Aquilegia ballii · Aquilegia baluchistanica
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Aquilegia paui by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
