Eleocharis acutaR.Br.

WFO wfo-0000402695 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Eleocharis acuta, photographed by Halema J
fig. a Halema J, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-01 / obs. 192799401
Eleocharis acuta, photographed by Arnim Littek
fig. b Arnim Littek, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 190242930
Eleocharis acuta, photographed by Colin Meurk
fig. c Colin Meurk, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 187762776
Eleocharis acuta, photographed by Jenny Saito
fig. d Jenny Saito, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 185970599
Eleocharis acuta, photographed by Paul Bell-Butler
fig. e Paul Bell-Butler, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 180055584
Eleocharis acuta, photographed by Arnim Littek
fig. f Arnim Littek, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 178294397
Eleocharis acuta, photographed by John Barkla
fig. g John Barkla, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 177874203
Eleocharis acuta, photographed by Pieter Pelser
fig. h Pieter Pelser, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203776457

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 12 botanical countries

Regions where Eleocharis acuta is native: New Guinea, Chatham Is., Kermadec Is., New South Wales, New Zealand North, New Zealand South, Norfolk Is., Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, Western Australia New GuineaNew South WalesNew Zealand NorthNew Zealand SouthQueenslandSouth AustraliaTasmaniaVictoriaWestern Australia Chatham Is.Kermadec Is.Norfolk Is.
Native distribution of Eleocharis acuta, 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
Chatham Is. CTM AUSTRALASIA
Kermadec Is. KER
New South Wales NSW
New Zealand North NZN
New Zealand South NZS
Norfolk Is. NFK
Queensland QLD
South Australia SOA
Tasmania TAS
Victoria VIC
Western Australia WAU
New Guinea NWG ASIA-TROPICAL

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 69 in flower of 104 examined

Peak flowering in Oct. Each bar is the share of Eleocharis acuta 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. 69 of 104 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 622 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -2.2 °C 5.7 °C 9.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 16.6 °C 20.8 °C 25.6 °C
Annual rainfall 586 mm 1,051 mm 2,412 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 90 mm 207 mm 482 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 622 research-grade observations of Eleocharis acuta 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 11 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.

  • Eleocharis acuta var. pallens Benth.
  • Eleocharis acuta var. platylepis Hook.f.
  • Eleocharis acuta var. tenuis Carse
  • Eleocharis ambigua Kirk & Buchanan
  • Eleocharis gracilis Hook.f.
  • Eleocharis mucronulata Nees
  • Eleocharis mucronulata var. minor Nees
  • Eleocharis palustris var. mucronulata Boeckeler
  • Hemicarpha nuda Boeckeler
  • Scirpus acutus (R.Br.) Spreng.
  • Scirpus mucronulatus (Nees) Kuntze

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. 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.