Carex lyngbyei (Lyngbye's sedge)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Carex lyngbyei, photographed by Trevor Van Loon — fig. a Trevor Van Loon, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-08-28 / obs. 155790316

Carex lyngbyei, photographed by Matt Muir — fig. b Matt Muir, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 150789787

Carex lyngbyei, photographed by Randal — fig. c Randal, CC0 1.0 / obs. 132346303

Carex lyngbyei, photographed by Laura Holloway — fig. d Laura Holloway, CC0 1.0 / obs. 136426010

Carex lyngbyei, photographed by B. Hughes — fig. e B. Hughes, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 84481049

Carex lyngbyei, photographed by Connie Taylor — fig. f Connie Taylor, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 44260442

Carex lyngbyei, photographed by Eric Knight — fig. g Eric Knight, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 22575882

Carex lyngbyei, photographed by emma reader-lee — fig. h emma reader-lee, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 202592584

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 3503467
Filed as: Carex lyngbyei Hornem.
Det. by: Shetler, Stanwyn G., (US), NMNH
Collected: W. Sladen 1961-07-09
Origin: US
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 17 botanical countries

Native distribution of Carex lyngbyei, 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
Japan	JAP	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Kamchatka	KAM
Khabarovsk	KHA
Korea	KOR
Kuril Is.	KUR
Magadan	MAG
Primorye	PRM
Sakhalin	SAK
Alaska	ASK	NORTHERN AMERICA
Aleutian Is.	ALU
British Columbia	BRC
California	CAL
Greenland	GNL
Oregon	ORE
Washington	WAS
Føroyar	FOR	EUROPE
Iceland	ICE

Not drawn on the map: Kuril Is., Aleutian Is.. We hold no public-domain boundary for these regions, so they are 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 611 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-13.5 °C	2.3 °C	6.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	14.4 °C	19.4 °C	24.6 °C
Annual rainfall	750 mm	1,807 mm	3,838 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	61 mm	159 mm	482 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 611 research-grade observations of Carex lyngbyei 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 38 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 behringensis Gand.
Carex capillipes Drejer
Carex cryptocarpa C.A.Mey.
Carex cryptocarpa var. pumila L.H.Bailey
Carex cryptocarpa var. variegata (Drejer) Britton
Carex filipendula Drejer
Carex filipendula var. concolor Drejer
Carex filipendula var. littoralis Drejer
Carex filipendula var. variegata Drejer
Carex halophila subsp. cryptocarpa (C.A.Mey.) Nyman
Carex laticuspis Franch.
Carex lyngbyei subsp. cryptocarpa (C.A.Mey.) Hultén
Carex lyngbyei subsp. phenocarpa Akiyama
Carex lyngbyei subsp. prionocarpa (Franch.) Kitag.
Carex lyngbyei var. capillipes (Drejer) Kük.
Carex lyngbyei var. cryptocarpa (C.A.Mey.) Hultén
Carex lyngbyei var. gigas Hultén
Carex lyngbyei var. prionocarpa (Franch.) Kük.
Carex lyngbyei var. prionocarpa (Franch.) Shekhovts.
Carex lyngbyei var. robusta (L.H.Bailey) B.Boivin
Carex lyngbyei var. robusta (L.H.Bailey) Cronquist
Carex lyngbyei var. variegata (Drejer) Kük.
Carex macounii A.Benn.
Carex maritima subsp. capillipes (Drejer) K.Richt.

and 14 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.