Carex kobomugi (Japanese sedge)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Carex kobomugi, photographed by Jacy Chen — fig. a Jacy Chen, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-04-24 / obs. 148953837

Carex kobomugi, photographed by kamataryo — fig. b kamataryo, CC0 1.0 / obs. 130251906

Carex kobomugi, photographed by Bonnie Semmling — fig. c Bonnie Semmling, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 115843059

Carex kobomugi, photographed by Yoshihiro Tokue — fig. e Yoshihiro Tokue, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 97937412

Carex kobomugi, photographed by gwt2102 — fig. g gwt2102, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 73256139

Carex kobomugi, photographed by 國立臺灣博物館 — fig. h 國立臺灣博物館, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 64571216

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

Native distribution of Carex kobomugi, 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
China North-Central	CHN	ASIA-TEMPERATE
China Southeast	CHS
Japan	JAP
Korea	KOR
Manchuria	CHM
Nansei-shoto	NNS
Primorye	PRM
Qinghai	CHQ
Sakhalin	SAK
Taiwan	TAI

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 244 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-13.5 °C	1.4 °C	15.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	23.6 °C	27.9 °C	30.1 °C
Annual rainfall	755 mm	1,353 mm	3,600 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	47 mm	266 mm	701 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 244 research-grade observations of Carex kobomugi 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 4 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 macrocephala f. kobomugi (Ohwi) Makino
Carex macrocephala var. kobomugi (Ohwi) Miyabe & Kudô
Carex macrocephala var. longibracteata Oliv.
Vignea kobomugi (Ohwi) Soják

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.