Caladenia catenata(Sm.) Druce

White Fingers

WFO wfo-0000722579 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Caladenia catenata, photographed by Joe Atkinson
fig. a Joe Atkinson, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-10-12 / obs. 163539189

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 11 botanical countries

Regions where Caladenia catenata is native: Jawa, Lesser Sunda Is., Sulawesi, Antipodean Is., Chatham Is., New South Wales, New Zealand North, New Zealand South, Queensland, Victoria, New Caledonia JawaLesser Sunda Is.SulawesiNew South WalesNew Zealand NorthNew Zealand SouthQueenslandVictoriaNew Caledonia Antipodean Is.Chatham Is.
Native distribution of Caladenia catenata, 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
Victoria VIC
Jawa JAW ASIA-TROPICAL
Lesser Sunda Is. LSI
Sulawesi SUL
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 337 in flower of 337 examined

Proportion of examined Caladenia catenata in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 3 3 too few examined
Feb 1 1 too few examined
Mar 0 0 too few examined
Apr 0 0 too few examined
May 2 2 too few examined
Jun 3 3 too few examined
Jul 9 9 100% 70% to 100%
Aug 102 102 100% 96% to 100%
Sep 139 139 100% 97% to 100%
Oct 72 72 100% 95% to 100%
Nov 6 6 100% 61% to 100%
Dec 0 0 too few examined

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Caladenia catenata 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. 337 of 337 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 1,980 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 4.9 °C 7.6 °C 11.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 21.2 °C 24.9 °C 28.2 °C
Annual rainfall 690 mm 941 mm 1,320 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 122 mm 180 mm 229 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 1,980 research-grade observations of Caladenia catenata 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 6 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.

  • Arethusa catenata Sm.
  • Caladenia alba R.Br.
  • Caladenia carnea var. alba (R.Br.) Benth.
  • Caladenia javanica Benn. ex Ridl.
  • Petalochilus catenatus (Sm.) D.L.Jones & M.A.Clem.
  • Petalochilus javanicus (Benn. ex Ridl.) 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.