Digitalis luteaL.

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WFO wfo-0000647340 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Digitalis lutea, photographed by Josep Gesti
fig. a Josep Gesti, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-06-11 / obs. 205202279

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 8 botanical countries

Regions where Digitalis lutea is native: Austria, Belgium, Corse, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland AustriaBelgiumCorseFranceGermanyItalySpainSwitzerland
Native distribution of Digitalis lutea, 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
Austria AUT EUROPE
Belgium BGM
Corse COR
France FRA
Germany GER
Italy ITA
Spain SPA
Switzerland SWI

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 454 in flower of 549 examined

Proportion of examined Digitalis lutea in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 0 too few examined
Feb 0 1 too few examined
Mar 0 0 too few examined
Apr 0 2 too few examined
May 19 29 66% 47% to 80%
Jun 217 228 95% 92% to 97%
Jul 185 195 95% 91% to 97%
Aug 32 61 52% 40% to 64%
Sep 0 16 0% 0% to 19%
Oct 0 6 0% 0% to 39%
Nov 1 9 11% 2% to 44%
Dec 0 2 too few examined

Peak flowering in Jun. Each bar is the share of Digitalis lutea 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. 454 of 549 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 5 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 1,999 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -10.4 °C -3.2 °C 1.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 18.5 °C 22.7 °C 28.1 °C
Annual rainfall 749 mm 1,125 mm 1,772 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 116 mm 200 mm 342 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 1,999 research-grade observations of Digitalis lutea 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 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.

  • Digitalis acuta Moench
  • Digitalis aurea Desf.
  • Digitalis australis Ten.
  • Digitalis fontanesii Steud.
  • Digitalis guellii Sennen
  • Digitalis intermedia Pers.
  • Digitalis lutea var. bracteata Lej. & Courtois
  • Digitalis lutea var. ciliata Lej.
  • Digitalis lutea var. glanduloso-villosa F.Gérard
  • Digitalis lutea var. hirsuta Coss. & Germ.
  • Digitalis lutea var. media Wender.
  • Digitalis lutea var. micrantha (Elmig.) Lindl.
  • Digitalis lutea var. minor Wender.
  • Digitalis lutea var. pubescens Bréb.
  • Digitalis micrantha Elmig.
  • Digitalis micrantha f. puberula Pamp.
  • Digitalis nutans Gaterau
  • Digitalis obtusa Moench
  • Digitalis ornata Porta ex Huter
  • Digitalis parviflora Lam.

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.