Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations
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 250983
- Filed as
- Carex ornithopoda Willd.
- Det. by
- Strong, Mark T., (BOT), Smithsonian Institution - National Museum of Natural History (UNITED STATES)
- Collected
- A. Mouillefarine 1894-05-13
- Origin
- FR
- 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 25 botanical countries
| Region | TDWG code | Continent |
|---|---|---|
| Albania | ALB | EUROPE |
| Austria | AUT | |
| Baltic States | BLT | |
| Belarus | BLR | |
| Belgium | BGM | |
| Central European Russia | RUC | |
| Corse | COR | |
| Czechia-Slovakia | CZE | |
| East European Russia | RUE | |
| Finland | FIN | |
| France | FRA | |
| Germany | GER | |
| Great Britain | GRB | |
| Italy | ITA | |
| North European Russia | RUN | |
| Northwest European Russia | RUW | |
| Norway | NOR | |
| NW. Balkan Pen. | YUG | |
| Poland | POL | |
| Romania | ROM | |
| Spain | SPA | |
| Sweden | SWE | |
| Switzerland | SWI | |
| Ukraine | UKR | |
| Türkiye | TUR | ASIA-TEMPERATE |
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 463 observations
| Condition | 5th percentile | Median | 95th percentile |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coldest month, mean daily low | -14.2 °C | -6.3 °C | -1.2 °C |
| Warmest month, mean daily high | 14.8 °C | 21.8 °C | 25.0 °C |
| Annual rainfall | 662 mm | 1,010 mm | 2,107 mm |
| Rainfall in the driest quarter | 101 mm | 182 mm | 379 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 463 research-grade observations of Carex ornithopoda 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.
Named cultivars 1 recorded
Selections of Carex ornithopoda that somebody named and propagated. A cultivar is not a botanical taxon: it is governed by the cultivated-plant code rather than the botanical one, so it appears in no taxonomic backbone, and it has no native range and no wild population of its own. These get no page here, because a cultivar has no photographs, no range and no flowering data of its own, and a page with none of those is not a page.
- ‘ʽVariegata’’ Q110766103
From Wikidata (CC0), joined to this species on its World Flora Online identifier, so the link to the parent is exact rather than a name match. This list is what is recorded in an openly licensed register; it is not every cultivar that exists, and for many genera it is not close. Why, and how far short it falls.
Also published as 25 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 castaneopsis Landolt
- Carex digitata subsp. ornithopoda (Willd.) Bonnier & Layens
- Carex digitata var. ornithopoda (Willd.) DC.
- Carex digitata var. ornithopoda (Willd.) G.Mey.
- Carex digitata var. ornithopodioides (Hausm.) Bolzon
- Carex digitata var. ornithopodioides (Hausm.) Fiori
- Carex digitata var. subnivalis Bolzon
- Carex ornithopoda f. elongata Leyb.
- Carex ornithopoda f. major Bornm. ex Kük.
- Carex ornithopoda subsp. elongata (Leyb.) Vierh.
- Carex ornithopoda var. alpina Kük.
- Carex ornithopoda var. alpina Gaudin
- Carex ornithopoda var. arcuata Erdner
- Carex ornithopoda var. castanea Murb.
- Carex ornithopoda var. elongata (Leyb.) Asch. & Graebn.
- Carex ornithopoda var. hausmannii Döll
- Carex ornithopoda var. ornithopodioides (Hausm.) Garcke
- Carex ornithopodioides Hausm.
- Carex ornithopodioides f. elongata Leyb.
- Carex ornithopodioides f. supina Leyb.
- Carex pedata All.
- Carex pedata L.
- Carex pusilla Arv.-Touv.
- Carex reclinata Facchini
and 1 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.
- 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.