Atriplex cinerea (gray saltbush)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Atriplex cinerea, photographed by Rod Lowther — fig. a Rod Lowther, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-04-29 / obs. 191494858

Atriplex cinerea, photographed by Peter B — fig. b Peter B, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 182629806

Atriplex cinerea, photographed by Doug Miller — fig. c Doug Miller, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 166241770

Atriplex cinerea, photographed by Lek Khauv — fig. e Lek Khauv, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 165043210

Atriplex cinerea, photographed by Paul Bell-Butler — fig. f Paul Bell-Butler, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 162743133

Atriplex cinerea, photographed by Kym Nicolson — fig. g Kym Nicolson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 165000336

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.

Native range 10 botanical countries

Native distribution of Atriplex cinerea, 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. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
New South Wales	NSW	AUSTRALASIA
Norfolk Is.	NFK
South Australia	SOA
Tasmania	TAS
Victoria	VIC
Western Australia	WAU
Cape Provinces	CPP	AFRICA
Free State	OFS
Lesotho	LES
Namibia	NAM

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 48 in flower of 77 examined

20%

29%

60%

50%

78%

86%

71%

43%

Proportion of examined Atriplex cinerea in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	2	2	too few examined
Feb	0	1	too few examined
Mar	1	5	20%	4% to 62%
Apr	2	7	29%	8% to 64%
May	0	3	too few examined
Jun	3	5	60%	23% to 88%
Jul	3	6	50%	19% to 81%
Aug	7	9	78%	45% to 94%
Sep	19	22	86%	67% to 95%
Oct	5	7	71%	36% to 92%
Nov	3	3	too few examined
Dec	3	7	43%	16% to 75%

Peak flowering in Sep. Each bar is the share of Atriplex cinerea 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. 48 of 77 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 4 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 1,430 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	5.9 °C	8.6 °C	10.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	18.8 °C	22.2 °C	24.8 °C
Annual rainfall	503 mm	688 mm	1,168 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	54 mm	130 mm	233 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,430 research-grade observations of Atriplex cinerea 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 10 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.

Atriplex cinerea f. appendiculata Aellen
Atriplex cinerea subsp. globulosa Aellen
Atriplex cinerea var. adscendens (Nees) H.Eichler
Atriplex cinerea var. elaeagnoides (Moq.) Moq.
Atriplex cinerea var. palmata Aellen
Atriplex elaeagnoides Moq.
Atriplex halimus R.Br.
Atriplex halimus var. adscendens Nees
Atriplex prostrata Moq.
Neopreissia cinerea (Poir.) Ulbr.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.