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 2156634
- Filed as
- Cyperus michelianus (L.) Delile
- Det. by
- Strong, Mark T., (BOT), Smithsonian Institution - National Museum of Natural History (UNITED STATES)
- Collected
- M. Furuse 1952-10-22
- Origin
- JP
- 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. 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 94 botanical countries
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 235 observations
| Condition | 5th percentile | Median | 95th percentile |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coldest month, mean daily low | -9.4 °C | -3.5 °C | 10.7 °C |
| Warmest month, mean daily high | 23.9 °C | 27.2 °C | 34.9 °C |
| Annual rainfall | 265 mm | 599 mm | 970 mm |
| Rainfall in the driest quarter | 11 mm | 98 mm | 165 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 235 research-grade observations of Cyperus michelianus 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.
- Cyperus diffusus Roxb.
- Cyperus extremiorientalis Ohwi
- Cyperus hyalinolepis Steud.
- Cyperus italicus Rottb.
- Cyperus michelianus f. elatus Kük.
- Cyperus minutulus Vahl
- Cyperus mulen-pullu Schult.
- Cyperus musarius Buch.-Ham. ex Wall.
- Cyperus paradoxus Steud.
- Cyperus pugioniformis A.Dietr.
- Cyperus pygmaeus Rottb.
- Dichostylis micheliana f. conglomerata (Beck) Soó
- Dichostylis micheliana f. elata (Kük.) Soó
- Dichostylis pygmaea (Rottb.) Nees
- Dichostylis wolgensis A.O.Tarassov
- Juncellus pygmaeus (Rottb.) C.B.Clarke
- Pycreus pygmaeus (Rottb.) Nees
- Schoenus capitatus Dubois
- Scirpus michelianus f. conglomeratus Beck
- Scirpus michelii Bubani
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.