Eriochilus cucullatus(Labill.) Rchb.f.

Parson's bands

WFO wfo-0000953636 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Eriochilus cucullatus, photographed by Eileen Laidlaw
fig. a Eileen Laidlaw, CC0 1.0 / 2022-05-08 / obs. 196055824

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 5 botanical countries

Regions where Eriochilus cucullatus is native: New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria New South WalesQueenslandSouth AustraliaTasmaniaVictoria
Native distribution of Eriochilus cucullatus, 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
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 369 in flower of 382 examined

Proportion of examined Eriochilus cucullatus in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 21 21 100% 85% to 100%
Feb 76 78 97% 91% to 99%
Mar 142 142 100% 97% to 100%
Apr 117 118 99% 95% to 100%
May 11 14 79% 52% to 92%
Jun 1 2 too few examined
Jul 0 2 too few examined
Aug 0 2 too few examined
Sep 0 0 too few examined
Oct 0 1 too few examined
Nov 0 1 too few examined
Dec 1 1 too few examined

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Eriochilus cucullatus 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. 369 of 382 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 7 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 1,679 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 0.9 °C 4.8 °C 9.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 17.2 °C 24.4 °C 27.9 °C
Annual rainfall 577 mm 787 mm 1,218 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 86 mm 144 mm 216 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 1,679 research-grade observations of Eriochilus cucullatus 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 4 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.

  • Epipactis cucullata Labill.
  • Eriochilus autumnalis R.Br.
  • Graphorkis cucullata (Labill.) Kuntze
  • Serapias cucullata (Labill.) Pers.

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.