Carex pendulaHuds.

hanging sedge

WFO wfo-0000349898 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Carex pendula, photographed by Daniel Cahen
fig. a Daniel Cahen, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-12 / obs. 205529460

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
The New York Botanical Garden
Accession
02456271
Filed as
Carex pendula Huds.
Det. by
R. F. C. Naczi 2015-01-01
Collected
D. E. Atha 2014-06-19
Origin
US
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. We link to the digitised sheet rather than rehosting it, because the holding institutions do not serve their images to third parties reliably and we are not going to show you a picture we cannot actually deliver. 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 sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 28 botanical countries

Regions where Carex pendula is native: Algeria, Madeira, Morocco, Tunisia, Cyprus, East Aegean Is., Lebanon-Syria, Palestine, Türkiye, Belgium, Corse, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Kriti, Netherlands, NW. Balkan Pen., Portugal, Sardegna, Sicilia, Spain, Switzerland, Türkiye-in-Europe AlgeriaMoroccoTunisiaCyprusEast Aegean Is.Lebanon-SyriaPalestineTürkiyeBelgiumCorseDenmarkFranceGermanyGreeceHungaryIrelandItalyKritiNetherlandsNW. Balkan Pen.PortugalSiciliaSpainSwitzerlandTürkiye-in-Europe MadeiraSardegna
Native distribution of Carex pendula, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Belgium BGM EUROPE
Corse COR
Denmark DEN
France FRA
Germany GER
Great Britain GRB
Greece GRC
Hungary HUN
Ireland IRE
Italy ITA
Kriti KRI
Netherlands NET
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Portugal POR
Sardegna SAR
Sicilia SIC
Spain SPA
Switzerland SWI
Türkiye-in-Europe TUE
Cyprus CYP ASIA-TEMPERATE
East Aegean Is. EAI
Lebanon-Syria LBS
Palestine PAL
Türkiye TUR
Algeria ALG AFRICA
Madeira MDR
Morocco MOR
Tunisia TUN

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.

Flowering 212 in flower of 458 examined

Proportion of examined Carex pendula in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 11 0% 0% to 26%
Feb 0 17 0% 0% to 18%
Mar 3 21 14% 5% to 35%
Apr 109 136 80% 73% to 86%
May 68 96 71% 61% to 79%
Jun 14 60 23% 14% to 35%
Jul 5 30 17% 7% to 34%
Aug 3 30 10% 3% to 26%
Sep 2 17 12% 3% to 34%
Oct 3 15 20% 7% to 45%
Nov 1 12 8% 1% to 35%
Dec 4 13 31% 13% to 58%

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Carex pendula 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. 212 of 458 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 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 1,984 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -3.2 °C 1.7 °C 4.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 17.8 °C 20.7 °C 27.8 °C
Annual rainfall 626 mm 867 mm 1,497 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 90 mm 163 mm 279 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 1,984 research-grade observations of Carex pendula 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 6 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 maxima Scop.
  • Carex pendula f. pallida Asch. & Graebn.
  • Carex tenuirostrata X.F.Jin, S.H.Jin & D.F.Wu
  • Manochlaenia pendula (Huds.) Fedde & J.Schust.
  • Trasus pendulus (Huds.) Gray
  • Trasus pendulus var. androgynus Gray

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. 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.