Festuca pallens

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 6 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 6 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Festuca pallens, photographed by Patrick Hacker — fig. a Patrick Hacker, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-06-06 / obs. 134564462

Festuca pallens, photographed by Wolfgang Jauch — fig. b Wolfgang Jauch, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 128637562

Festuca pallens, photographed by Christoph Moning — fig. c Christoph Moning, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 128361742

Festuca pallens, photographed by Christian Berg — fig. e Christian Berg, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 119326020

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: 04242502
Filed as: Festuca pallens subsp. pallens
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 11 botanical countries

Native distribution of Festuca pallens, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Austria	AUT	EUROPE
Belgium	BGM
Czechia-Slovakia	CZE
France	FRA
Germany	GER
Hungary	HUN
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Poland	POL
Romania	ROM
Switzerland	SWI
Ukraine	UKR

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 71 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-6.9 °C	-4.2 °C	-3.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	21.3 °C	23.9 °C	25.8 °C
Annual rainfall	515 mm	746 mm	1,026 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	75 mm	107 mm	222 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 71 research-grade observations of Festuca pallens 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 46 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.

Festuca arduenna Dumort.
Festuca cinerea f. longiaristata Rauschert
Festuca cinerea subsp. pallens (Host) Stöhr
Festuca communis var. glauca Petif
Festuca duriuscula f. fratrensis Krajina
Festuca duriuscula f. pubiculmis Hack. ex Rohlena
Festuca duriuscula f. rachsturmensis Krajina
Festuca duriuscula subvar. virens Krajina
Festuca duriuscula var. pallens (Host) Krajina
Festuca duriuscula var. sandomiriensis Zapał.
Festuca glauca f. barbata Hack.
Festuca glauca f. borhidiana Soó
Festuca glauca f. elongata Hack.
Festuca glauca f. hirsuta Heuff.
Festuca glauca f. scabens Beck
Festuca glauca f. virens (Krajina) Soó
Festuca glauca subsp. pallens K.Richt.
Festuca glauca var. arduenna (Dumort.) Mathieu
Festuca glauca var. hirsuta Heuff.
Festuca glauca var. major Hagenb.
Festuca glauca var. pallens (Host) K.Richt.
Festuca glauca var. rigurosa (Schur) Soó
Festuca glauca var. rupicola Schur
Festuca glauca var. scabens Beck

and 22 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.
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.