Carex fraseriana (Fraser's cymophyllus)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Carex fraseriana, photographed by Some Luser — fig. a Some Luser, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-04-21 / obs. 190022288

Carex fraseriana, photographed by Jessica Williams — fig. b Jessica Williams, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 188605499

Carex fraseriana, photographed by Tom Field — fig. c Tom Field, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 140151228

Carex fraseriana, photographed by Will Kuhn — fig. d Will Kuhn, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 120049209

Carex fraseriana, photographed by Reid Hardin — fig. e Reid Hardin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 100188699

Carex fraseriana, photographed by Robert Harris — fig. h Robert Harris, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 35742724

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 9 botanical countries

Native distribution of Carex fraseriana, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Georgia	GEO	NORTHERN AMERICA
Kentucky	KTY
Maryland	MRY
North Carolina	NCA
Pennsylvania	PEN
South Carolina	SCA
Tennessee	TEN
Virginia	VRG
West Virginia	WVA

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 56 in flower of 77 examined

90%

91%

42%

Proportion of examined Carex fraseriana in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	0	too few examined
Feb	0	0	too few examined
Mar	9	10	90%	60% to 98%
Apr	42	46	91%	80% to 97%
May	5	12	42%	19% to 68%
Jun	0	5	0%	0% to 43%
Jul	0	0	too few examined
Aug	0	0	too few examined
Sep	0	1	too few examined
Oct	0	3	too few examined
Nov	0	0	too few examined
Dec	0	0	too few examined

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Carex fraseriana 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. 56 of 77 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 8 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 757 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-7.3 °C	-3.5 °C	-1.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	22.9 °C	25.9 °C	28.5 °C
Annual rainfall	1,177 mm	1,508 mm	1,819 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	234 mm	287 mm	373 mm

It is found where winters bring hard frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 757 research-grade observations of Carex fraseriana 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.

Carex fraseri Andrews
Carex lagopus Muhl.
Cymophyllus fraseri (Andrews) Mack.
Cymophyllus fraserianus (Ker Gawl.) Kartesz & Gandhi
Mapania sylvatica Pursh
Olamblis fraseri (Andrews) Raf.

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.
USDA PLANTS Database. common name, checklist symbol CYFR4. public domain. 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.