Carex gracillima (graceful sedge)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Carex gracillima, photographed by Ryan Sorrells — fig. a Ryan Sorrells, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-12 / obs. 205835609

Carex gracillima, photographed by Erin Snyder — fig. b Erin Snyder, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 200428270

Carex gracillima, photographed by Healthy Yards — fig. c Healthy Yards, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 199879497

Carex gracillima, photographed by Randy A Nonenmacher — fig. d Randy A Nonenmacher, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 154184577

Carex gracillima, photographed by Quinten Wiegersma — fig. e Quinten Wiegersma, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 142614832

Carex gracillima, photographed by Allan Harris — fig. f Allan Harris, CC0 1.0 / obs. 140459575

Carex gracillima, photographed by Reuven Martin — fig. g Reuven Martin, CC0 1.0 / obs. 138246967

Carex gracillima, photographed by Henry "Nick" Robertson — fig. h Henry "Nick" Robertson, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 137715420

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 36 botanical countries

Native distribution of Carex gracillima, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Alabama	ALA	NORTHERN AMERICA
Arkansas	ARK
Connecticut	CNT
Delaware	DEL
Georgia	GEO
Illinois	ILL
Indiana	INI
Iowa	IOW
Kentucky	KTY
Maine	MAI
Manitoba	MAN
Maryland	MRY
Massachusetts	MAS
Michigan	MIC
Minnesota	MIN
Missouri	MSO
New Brunswick	NBR
New Hampshire	NWH
New Jersey	NWJ
New York	NWY
Newfoundland	NFL
North Carolina	NCA
North Dakota	NDA
Nova Scotia	NSC
Ohio	OHI
Ontario	ONT
Pennsylvania	PEN
Prince Edward I.	PEI
Québec	QUE
Rhode I.	RHO
South Carolina	SCA
Tennessee	TEN
Vermont	VER
Virginia	VRG
West Virginia	WVA
Wisconsin	WIS

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 34 in flower of 222 examined

23%

15%

Proportion of examined Carex gracillima in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	0	too few examined
Feb	0	0	too few examined
Mar	0	0	too few examined
Apr	0	3	too few examined
May	18	78	23%	15% to 34%
Jun	15	103	15%	9% to 23%
Jul	1	28	4%	1% to 18%
Aug	0	4	too few examined
Sep	0	3	too few examined
Oct	0	3	too few examined
Nov	0	0	too few examined
Dec	0	0	too few examined

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Carex gracillima 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. 34 of 222 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 9 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 1,997 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-16.1 °C	-10.1 °C	-5.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	22.8 °C	25.8 °C	28.1 °C
Annual rainfall	804 mm	985 mm	1,343 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	77 mm	194 mm	284 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 1,997 research-grade observations of Carex gracillima 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 8 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 digitalis Schwein. & Torr.
Carex gracillima f. humilis L.H.Bailey
Carex gracillima f. humilis Kük.
Carex gracillima var. gracillima
Carex gracillima var. humile L.H.Bailey
Carex gracillima var. humilis (L.H.Bailey) L.H.Bailey
Carex gracillima var. macerrima Fernald & Wiegand
Loxanisa gracillima (Schwein.) 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.
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.