Caladenia carneaR.Br.

Pink fingers orchid

WFO wfo-0000721414 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Caladenia carnea, photographed by T. Hammer
fig. a T. Hammer, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-10-31 / obs. 166538425

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

Regions where Caladenia carnea is native: Antipodean Is., Chatham Is., New South Wales, New Zealand North, New Zealand South, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, New Caledonia New South WalesNew Zealand NorthNew Zealand SouthQueenslandSouth AustraliaTasmaniaVictoriaNew Caledonia Antipodean Is.Chatham Is.
Native distribution of Caladenia carnea, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Antipodean Is. ATP AUSTRALASIA
Chatham Is. CTM
New South Wales NSW
New Zealand North NZN
New Zealand South NZS
Queensland QLD
South Australia SOA
Tasmania TAS
Victoria VIC
New Caledonia NWC PACIFIC

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 1,306 in flower of 1,312 examined

Proportion of examined Caladenia carnea in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 0 too few examined
Feb 0 0 too few examined
Mar 1 1 too few examined
Apr 0 0 too few examined
May 1 1 too few examined
Jun 0 0 too few examined
Jul 7 7 100% 65% to 100%
Aug 38 38 100% 91% to 100%
Sep 719 722 100% 99% to 100%
Oct 501 504 99% 98% to 100%
Nov 37 37 100% 91% to 100%
Dec 2 2 too few examined

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Caladenia carnea 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. 1,306 of 1,312 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 7 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 1,969 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 1.7 °C 5.4 °C 9.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 20.8 °C 25.3 °C 28.2 °C
Annual rainfall 474 mm 787 mm 1,167 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 56 mm 137 mm 201 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 1,969 research-grade observations of Caladenia carnea 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 5 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.

  • Caladenia angustata Hook.f.
  • Caladenia atkinsonii Rodway
  • Caladenia carnea var. subulata Nicholls
  • Caladenia catenata f. carnea (R.Br.) N.Hallé
  • Petalochilus carneus (R.Br.) D.L.Jones & M.A.Clem.

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. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. 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.