Avena fatuaL.

wild oat

WFO wfo-0000851838 Accepted WFO 2026-06 7 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–g

Avena fatua, photographed by Annika Lindqvist
fig. a Annika Lindqvist, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-11 / obs. 205498077
Avena fatua, photographed by KAnatoliy
fig. b KAnatoliy, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 201012314
Avena fatua, photographed by Christian Berg
fig. c Christian Berg, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 198321181
Avena fatua, photographed by Tony Rebelo
fig. d Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 172461870
Avena fatua, photographed by mdettling
fig. e mdettling, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 189233903
Avena fatua, photographed by Amy
fig. f Amy, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 181873139
Avena fatua, photographed by Tony Rebelo
fig. g Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 169135732

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.

Flowering n = 98 observations

Peak flowering in Apr, from 98 community-annotated observations worldwide. This is a global aggregate, not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres, and citizen-science records cluster near cities, at weekends, and in spring. Where a species has fewer than 30 annotated records we do not draw this chart at all.

Also published as 69 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.

  • Anelytrum avenaceum Hack.
  • Avena ambigua Schönh.
  • Avena ambigua Schoenb.
  • Avena cultiformis (Malzev) Malzev
  • Avena fatua f. deserticola Hausskn.
  • Avena fatua f. subcontracta Yamag.
  • Avena fatua subsp. brevipilosa Kiec
  • Avena fatua subsp. cultiformis Malzev
  • Avena fatua subsp. fatua
  • Avena fatua subsp. glabrata (Peterm.) Piper & Beattie
  • Avena fatua subsp. intermedia Nyman
  • Avena fatua subsp. meridionalis A.W.Hill
  • Avena fatua subsp. meridionalis Malzev
  • Avena fatua subsp. septentrionalis (Malzev) Malzev
  • Avena fatua subvar. naniformis Yamag.
  • Avena fatua subvar. pseudonana Yamag.
  • Avena fatua subvar. pumila Yamag.
  • Avena fatua subvar. zine Yamag.
  • Avena fatua var. acidophila Kiec
  • Avena fatua var. alcaliphila Kiec
  • Avena fatua var. alta Kiec
  • Avena fatua var. altissima Kiec
  • Avena fatua var. elongata Malzev
  • Avena fatua var. fatua

and 45 more.

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.

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