Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations
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 44 botanical countries
| Region | TDWG code | Continent |
|---|---|---|
| Afghanistan | AFG | ASIA-TEMPERATE |
| Cyprus | CYP | |
| East Aegean Is. | EAI | |
| Iran | IRN | |
| Iraq | IRQ | |
| Kuwait | KUW | |
| Lebanon-Syria | LBS | |
| North Caucasus | NCS | |
| Oman | OMA | |
| Palestine | PAL | |
| Saudi Arabia | SAU | |
| Sinai | SIN | |
| Tadzhikistan | TZK | |
| Transcaucasus | TCS | |
| Türkiye | TUR | |
| Turkmenistan | TKM | |
| Uzbekistan | UZB | |
| Yemen | YEM | |
| Albania | ALB | EUROPE |
| Baleares | BAL | |
| Bulgaria | BUL | |
| Corse | COR | |
| France | FRA | |
| Greece | GRC | |
| Italy | ITA | |
| Kriti | KRI | |
| NW. Balkan Pen. | YUG | |
| Portugal | POR | |
| Romania | ROM | |
| Sardegna | SAR | |
| Sicilia | SIC | |
| Spain | SPA | |
| Türkiye-in-Europe | TUE | |
| Algeria | ALG | AFRICA |
| Canary Is. | CNY | |
| Egypt | EGY | |
| Libya | LBY | |
| Morocco | MOR | |
| Tunisia | TUN | |
| Western Sahara | WSA | |
| Assam | ASS | ASIA-TROPICAL |
| Nepal | NEP | |
| Pakistan | PAK | |
| West Himalaya | WHM |
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 387 in flower of 466 examined
Peak flowering in Feb. Each bar is the share of Avena barbata 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. 387 of 466 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. One month has fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for it. 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 1,618 observations
| Condition | 5th percentile | Median | 95th percentile |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coldest month, mean daily low | 1.3 °C | 6.4 °C | 10.4 °C |
| Warmest month, mean daily high | 17.7 °C | 26.5 °C | 33.2 °C |
| Annual rainfall | 288 mm | 633 mm | 1,453 mm |
| Rainfall in the driest quarter | 4 mm | 10 mm | 163 mm |
It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,618 research-grade observations of Avena barbata 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 71 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.
- Avena alba f. fallax (Maire & Weiller) Maire & Weiller
- Avena alba f. triflora (Malzev) Maire & Weiller
- Avena alba subvar. aristulata (Malzev) Maire & Weiller
- Avena alba subvar. glabrifolia (Malzev) Maire & Weiller
- Avena alba subvar. minor (Lange) Maire & Weiller
- Avena alba var. barbata (Pott ex Link) Maire & Weiller
- Avena alba var. hirtula (Lag.) Emb. & Maire
- Avena alba var. wiestii (Steud.) Maire & Weiller
- Avena almeriensis Gand.
- Avena atheranthera C.Presl
- Avena barbata Brot.
- Avena barbata f. colorata Hausskn.
- Avena barbata subsp. atherantha (C.Presl) Rocha Afonso
- Avena barbata subsp. atheranthera (J.Presl) Roche Afonso
- Avena barbata subsp. barbata
- Avena barbata subsp. castellana Romero Zarco
- Avena barbata subsp. hirtula (Lag.) Tzvelev
- Avena barbata subsp. hirtula (Lag.) E.Morren
- Avena barbata subsp. hoppeana (Scheele) K.Richt.
- Avena barbata subsp. lusitanica (Tab.Morais) Romero Zarco
- Avena barbata subsp. subtypica (Malzev) Tzvelev
- Avena barbata subsp. wiestii (Steud.) Mansf.
- Avena barbata subsp. wiestii (Steud.) Tzvelev
- Avena barbata subvar. hirsuta (Moench) Tab.Morais
and 47 more.
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.