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Cynomorium is a genus of fleshy, parasitic plants with no chlorophyll, consisting of one species, Cynomorium coccineum. It lives underground on the roots of salt-tolerant host plants and only shows a dark red, club-shaped flower spike above ground in spring, so it cannot be grown as a normal garden plant.
Cynomorium is a genus of parasitic perennial flowering plants in the family Cynomoriaceae. The genus consists of only one species, Cynomorium coccineum (although one of its subspecies is sometimes treated as a separate species). Its placement in the Saxifragales was resolved in 2016 with the help of nuclear, plastid, and mitochondrial sequences obtained from next-generation sequencing. Common names include the misleading Maltese fungus or Maltese mushroom; also desert thumb, red thumb, tarthuth (Bedouin) and suoyang (Chinese). A rare or local species, it grows in dry, rocky or sandy soils, often in salt marshes or other saline habitats close to the coast. It has had a wide variety of uses in European, Arabian and Chinese herbal medicine.
Cynomorium coccineum var. coccineum is found from the Atlantic coastal desert in Mauritania and Western Sahara, through Morocco, the Canary Islands, southern Iberia (Portugal and Spain), the Balearic Islands, Algeria, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, southern Italy, Malta, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, Somalia, Iran and Afghanistan.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Cynomorium 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.
