Carex laevigata (smooth-stalked sedge)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 5 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 5 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Carex laevigata, photographed by Andre Hosper — fig. a Andre Hosper, CC BY 4.0 / 2018-05-20 / obs. 18457668

Carex laevigata, photographed by Bastien Alegot — fig. g Bastien Alegot, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 185346940

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 30777
Filed as: Carex laevigata Sm.
Det. by: Strong, Mark T., (BOT), Smithsonian Institution - National Museum of Natural History (UNITED STATES)
Collected: Collector illegible 1860-07
Origin: ZZ
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 12 botanical countries

Native distribution of Carex laevigata, 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
Belgium	BGM	EUROPE
Corse	COR
France	FRA
Germany	GER
Great Britain	GRB
Ireland	IRE
Italy	ITA
Netherlands	NET
Portugal	POR
Sicilia	SIC
Spain	SPA
Morocco	MOR	AFRICA

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 110 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-0.1 °C	3.6 °C	8.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	19.8 °C	24.0 °C	28.3 °C
Annual rainfall	787 mm	1,445 mm	2,088 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	26 mm	152 mm	266 mm

It is found where winters bring light 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 110 research-grade observations of Carex laevigata 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 20 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 andalusica (H.Lindb.) A.W.Hill
Carex andalusica H.Lindb.
Carex biligularis DC.
Carex binervis Dewey
Carex flacciformis Hoffmanns. ex Kunth
Carex helodes f. biligularis (DC.) Kük.
Carex helodes subsp. andalusica H.Lindb.
Carex helodes var. maurusia Font Quer & Maire
Carex laevigata f. biligularis (DC.) Asch. & Graebn.
Carex laevigata var. biligularis (DC.) Asch. & Graebn.
Carex laevigata var. biligularis (DC.) Nyman
Carex laevigata var. maurusia (Font Quer & Maire) C.Vicioso
Carex laevigata var. welwitschii (Boiss. ex Steud.) Boott
Carex longirostris Krock.
Carex patula Schkuhr
Carex pendula subsp. welwitschii (Boiss. ex Steud.) K.Richt.
Carex schraderi Willd.
Carex welwitschii Boiss. ex Steud.
Edritria laevigata (Sm.) Raf.
Trasus laevigatus (Sm.) Gray

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.