Dactylorhiza maculata (Heath spotted orchid)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Dactylorhiza maculata, photographed by Elias — fig. a Elias, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-12 / obs. 205719244

Dactylorhiza maculata, photographed by Michael Knapp — fig. b Michael Knapp, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205782294

Dactylorhiza maculata, photographed by veroalsace — fig. d veroalsace, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 205813138

Dactylorhiza maculata, photographed by John Kenrick Gibson — fig. e John Kenrick Gibson, CC0 1.0 / obs. 205390515

Dactylorhiza maculata, photographed by E. A. — fig. f E. A., CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204461491

Dactylorhiza maculata, photographed by Josh Hedley — fig. g Josh Hedley, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203218906

Dactylorhiza maculata, photographed by lukeromaine — fig. h lukeromaine, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203259404

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: 4055286
Filed as: Dactylorhiza maculata (L.) Soó
Det. by: not recorded on this sheet
Collected: not recorded
Origin: not recorded
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. 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 48 botanical countries

Native distribution of Dactylorhiza maculata, 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
Albania	ALB	EUROPE
Austria	AUT
Baltic States	BLT
Belarus	BLR
Belgium	BGM
Bulgaria	BUL
Central European Russia	RUC
Corse	COR
Czechia-Slovakia	CZE
Denmark	DEN
East European Russia	RUE
Finland	FIN
Føroyar	FOR
France	FRA
Germany	GER
Great Britain	GRB
Greece	GRC
Hungary	HUN
Iceland	ICE
Ireland	IRE
Italy	ITA
Netherlands	NET
North European Russia	RUN
Northwest European Russia	RUW
Norway	NOR
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Poland	POL
Portugal	POR
Romania	ROM
Sicilia	SIC
South European Russia	RUS
Spain	SPA
Sweden	SWE
Switzerland	SWI
Ukraine	UKR
Altay	ALT	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Buryatiya	BRY
Chita	CTA
Irkutsk	IRK
Krasnoyarsk	KRA
Mongolia	MON
Türkiye	TUR
Tuva	TVA
West Siberia	WSB
Xinjiang	CHX
Yakutiya	YAK
Algeria	ALG	AFRICA
Morocco	MOR

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 3,704 in flower of 3,845 examined

25%

84%

98%

99%

87%

25%

Proportion of examined Dactylorhiza maculata in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	0	too few examined
Feb	1	1	too few examined
Mar	1	1	too few examined
Apr	5	20	25%	11% to 47%
May	277	329	84%	80% to 88%
Jun	2004	2038	98%	98% to 99%
Jul	1313	1332	99%	98% to 99%
Aug	101	116	87%	80% to 92%
Sep	2	8	25%	7% to 59%
Oct	0	0	too few examined
Nov	0	0	too few examined
Dec	0	0	too few examined

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Dactylorhiza maculata 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. 3,704 of 3,845 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 6 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. 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 1,941 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-12.3 °C	-1.8 °C	5.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	13.1 °C	18.6 °C	23.6 °C
Annual rainfall	662 mm	1,269 mm	2,548 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	103 mm	206 mm	400 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 1,941 research-grade observations of Dactylorhiza maculata 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 286 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.

Dactylanthera chevallieriana subsp. somersetensis (A.Camus) J.M.H.Shaw
Dactylanthera somersetensis (A.Camus) B.Bock
Dactylorchis elodes (Griseb.) Verm.
Dactylorchis fuchsii (Druce) Verm.
Dactylorchis fuchsii subsp. sooana Borsos
Dactylorchis maculata (L.) Verm.
Dactylorchis maculata subsp. arduennensis Zadoks
Dactylorchis maculata subsp. elodes (Griseb.) Verm.
Dactylorchis maculata subsp. elodes Verm.
Dactylorchis maculata subsp. ericetorum (E.F.Linton) Verm.
Dactylorchis maculata subsp. islandica Á.Löve & D.Löve
Dactylorchis maculata subsp. montellii Verm.
Dactylorchis maculata subsp. rhoumensis (Hesl.-Harr.f.) Hesl.-Harr.f.
Dactylorchis maculata var. angustiflora Verm.
Dactylorchis maculata var. candidissima (Krock.) Verm.
Dactylorchis maculata var. compacta Verm.
Dactylorchis maculata var. concolor Verm.
Dactylorchis maculata var. densiflora Verm.
Dactylorchis maculata var. ericetorum (E.F.Linton) Verm.
Dactylorchis maculata var. grandiflora Verm.
Dactylorchis maculata var. heuffelii Borsos & Soó
Dactylorchis maculata var. hunyadensis Borsos & Soó
Dactylorchis maculata var. ibericoides Verm.
Dactylorchis maculata var. immaculata (Schur) Verm.

and 262 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.