Astragalus asperJacq.

WFO wfo-0000213536 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 7 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 7 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Astragalus asper, photographed by Patrick Hacker
fig. a Patrick Hacker, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-05-01 / obs. 124873679

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.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium
The New York Botanical Garden
Accession
02330629
Filed as
Astragalus asper Jacq.
Det. by
not recorded on this sheet
Collected
not recorded
Origin
not recorded
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 12 botanical countries

Regions where Astragalus asper is native: North Caucasus, Austria, Bulgaria, Central European Russia, Czechia-Slovakia, East European Russia, Hungary, Krym, NW. Balkan Pen., Romania, South European Russia, Ukraine North CaucasusAustriaBulgariaCentral European RussiaCzechia-SlovakiaEast European RussiaHungaryKrymNW. Balkan Pen.RomaniaSouth European RussiaUkraine
Native distribution of Astragalus asper, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Austria AUT EUROPE
Bulgaria BUL
Central European Russia RUC
Czechia-Slovakia CZE
East European Russia RUE
Hungary HUN
Krym KRY
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Romania ROM
South European Russia RUS
Ukraine UKR
North Caucasus NCS ASIA-TEMPERATE

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 46 in flower of 61 examined

Proportion of examined Astragalus asper in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 0 too few examined
Feb 0 0 too few examined
Mar 0 0 too few examined
Apr 7 10 70% 40% to 89%
May 30 36 83% 68% to 92%
Jun 7 9 78% 45% to 94%
Jul 2 3 too few examined
Aug 0 2 too few examined
Sep 0 1 too few examined
Oct 0 0 too few examined
Nov 0 0 too few examined
Dec 0 0 too few examined

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Astragalus asper observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 46 of 61 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 9 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 403 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -11.8 °C -3.3 °C -3.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 25.5 °C 26.5 °C 30.3 °C
Annual rainfall 395 mm 581 mm 642 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 74 mm 98 mm 110 mm

It is found where winters bring hard frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 403 research-grade observations of Astragalus asper that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 7 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.

  • Astragalus asper f. karpatii Soó
  • Astragalus asper var. leucotrichus Săvul. & Rayss
  • Astragalus chloranthus Pall.
  • Pedina aspera (Jacq.) Steven
  • Phaca aspera (Jacq.) Medik.
  • Solenotus asper Steven
  • Tragacantha aspera (Jacq.) Kuntze

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.
  3. Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.