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.
The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection
- Herbarium
- Smithsonian, US National Herbarium
- Accession
- US 2314611
- Filed as
- Carex atrata L.
- Det. by
- Strong, Mark T., (BOT), Smithsonian Institution - National Museum of Natural History (UNITED STATES)
- Collected
- J. Gröntved 1936-08-22
- Origin
- SE
- The sheet
- View the digitised specimen (CC0 1.0)
A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.
Native range 37 botanical countries
| Region | TDWG code | Continent |
|---|---|---|
| Albania | ALB | EUROPE |
| Austria | AUT | |
| Czechia-Slovakia | CZE | |
| East European Russia | RUE | |
| Finland | FIN | |
| Føroyar | FOR | |
| France | FRA | |
| Germany | GER | |
| Great Britain | GRB | |
| Greece | GRC | |
| Iceland | ICE | |
| Italy | ITA | |
| North European Russia | RUN | |
| Norway | NOR | |
| NW. Balkan Pen. | YUG | |
| Poland | POL | |
| Romania | ROM | |
| Spain | SPA | |
| Sweden | SWE | |
| Switzerland | SWI | |
| Ukraine | UKR | |
| China South-Central | CHC | ASIA-TEMPERATE |
| Japan | JAP | |
| Korea | KOR | |
| Manchuria | CHM | |
| North Caucasus | NCS | |
| Primorye | PRM | |
| Taiwan | TAI | |
| Tibet | CHT | |
| Transcaucasus | TCS | |
| Türkiye | TUR | |
| West Siberia | WSB | |
| East Himalaya | EHM | ASIA-TROPICAL |
| Myanmar | MYA | |
| Nepal | NEP | |
| Thailand | THA | |
| Greenland | GNL | NORTHERN AMERICA |
Not drawn on the map: Great Britain. We hold no public-domain boundary for this region, so it is listed rather than guessed at.
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.
Where it actually grows measured, from 273 observations
| Condition | 5th percentile | Median | 95th percentile |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coldest month, mean daily low | -18.1 °C | -13.0 °C | -6.7 °C |
| Warmest month, mean daily high | 10.8 °C | 13.8 °C | 17.3 °C |
| Annual rainfall | 736 mm | 1,579 mm | 3,706 mm |
| Rainfall in the driest quarter | 115 mm | 256 mm | 514 mm |
It is found where winters are severely cold. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 273 research-grade observations of Carex atrata 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.
Also published as 45 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.
- Carex aethostachya Schkuhr
- Carex apodostachya Ohwi
- Carex atrata f. castanea (Nyman) K.Richt.
- Carex atrata f. decolorans Neuman
- Carex atrata f. gelida Schur
- Carex atrata subf. aristata Podp.
- Carex atrata subsp. apodostachya (Ohwi) T.Koyama
- Carex atrata subsp. bicolor Čelak.
- Carex atrata subsp. castanea (Nyman) K.Richt.
- Carex atrata var. atrata
- Carex atrata var. bicolor Čelak.
- Carex atrata var. brunnescens Andersson
- Carex atrata var. castanea Nyman
- Carex atrata var. dubia Gaudin
- Carex atrata var. glacialis Boott
- Carex atrata var. heterostachya Almq.
- Carex atrata var. japonoalpina T.Koyama
- Carex atrata var. laxa Neilr.
- Carex atrata var. longistolonifera Kük.
- Carex atrata var. ovata Boott
- Carex atrata var. pseudocilicica Kük.
- Carex atrata var. pullata Boott
- Carex atrata var. rectiuscula Hartm.
- Carex atrata var. sinensis Kük.
and 21 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.