Cryptostylis subulata(Labill.) Rchb.f.

Large tongue orchid

WFO wfo-0000933401 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Cryptostylis subulata, photographed by Brendan Costello
fig. a Brendan Costello, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-02-23 / obs. 180441857

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 6 botanical countries

Regions where Cryptostylis subulata is native: New South Wales, New Zealand North, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria New South WalesNew Zealand NorthQueenslandSouth AustraliaTasmaniaVictoria
Native distribution of Cryptostylis subulata, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
New South Wales NSW AUSTRALASIA
New Zealand North NZN
Queensland QLD
South Australia SOA
Tasmania TAS
Victoria VIC

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 489 in flower of 563 examined

Proportion of examined Cryptostylis subulata in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 103 106 97% 92% to 99%
Feb 25 32 78% 61% to 89%
Mar 6 7 86% 49% to 97%
Apr 2 6 33% 10% to 70%
May 1 5 20% 4% to 62%
Jun 3 8 38% 14% to 69%
Jul 3 6 50% 19% to 81%
Aug 2 9 22% 6% to 55%
Sep 17 26 65% 46% to 81%
Oct 43 53 81% 69% to 89%
Nov 122 139 88% 81% to 92%
Dec 162 166 98% 94% to 99%

Peak flowering in Dec. Each bar is the share of Cryptostylis subulata 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. 489 of 563 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 2,036 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 2.0 °C 7.6 °C 12.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 22.0 °C 24.7 °C 26.6 °C
Annual rainfall 781 mm 1,111 mm 1,457 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 137 mm 195 mm 240 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 2,036 research-grade observations of Cryptostylis subulata 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 2 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.

  • Cryptostylis longifolia R.Br.
  • Malaxis subulata Labill.

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.