Ficinia nodosa(Rottb.) Goetgh., Muasya & D.A.Simpson

WFO wfo-0000418195 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Ficinia nodosa, photographed by Arnim Littek
fig. a Arnim Littek, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-11 / obs. 205972333

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
Smithsonian, US National Herbarium
Accession
US 3738166
Filed as
Ficinia nodosa (Rottb.) Goetgh., Muasya & D.A.Simpson
Det. by
Strong, Mark T., (BOT), Smithsonian Institution - National Museum of Natural History (UNITED STATES)
Collected
H. St. John & F. R. Fosberg 1934-06-30
Origin
PF
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC0 1.0)

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 17 botanical countries

Regions where Ficinia nodosa is native: Cape Provinces, KwaZulu-Natal, St.Helena, Amsterdam-St.Paul Is., Chatham Is., Kermadec Is., New South Wales, New Zealand North, New Zealand South, Norfolk Is., South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, Western Australia, Cook Is., Tubuai Is., Juan Fernández Is. Cape ProvincesKwaZulu-NatalNew South WalesNew Zealand NorthNew Zealand SouthSouth AustraliaTasmaniaVictoriaWestern Australia St.HelenaAmsterdam-St.Paul Is.Chatham Is.Kermadec Is.Norfolk Is.Cook Is.Tubuai Is.
Native distribution of Ficinia nodosa, 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
South Australia SOA
Tasmania TAS
Victoria VIC
Western Australia WAU
Cape Provinces CPP AFRICA
KwaZulu-Natal NAT
St.Helena STH
Cook Is. COO PACIFIC
Tubuai Is. TUB
Amsterdam-St.Paul Is. ASP ANTARCTICA
Juan Fernández Is. JNF SOUTHERN AMERICA

Not drawn on the map: Juan Fernández Is.. 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 591 in flower of 1,764 examined

Proportion of examined Ficinia nodosa in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 174 271 64% 58% to 70%
Feb 63 212 30% 24% to 36%
Mar 44 205 21% 16% to 28%
Apr 25 203 12% 8% to 18%
May 8 154 5% 3% to 10%
Jun 4 102 4% 2% to 10%
Jul 2 74 3% 1% to 9%
Aug 1 66 2% 0% to 8%
Sep 2 57 4% 1% to 12%
Oct 17 81 21% 14% to 31%
Nov 62 111 56% 47% to 65%
Dec 189 228 83% 77% to 87%

Peak flowering in Dec. Each bar is the share of Ficinia nodosa 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. 591 of 1,764 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 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 1,970 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 4.5 °C 8.8 °C 12.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 17.5 °C 20.9 °C 26.1 °C
Annual rainfall 545 mm 1,092 mm 1,744 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 56 mm 195 mm 358 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,970 research-grade observations of Ficinia nodosa 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 16 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.

  • Ficinia guttata Endl.
  • Fimbristylis schinzii Boeckeler
  • Fimbristylis textilis Roxb.
  • Holoschoenus nodosus (Rottb.) A.Dietr.
  • Isolepis gracilis (Rudge) Sweet
  • Isolepis holoschoenus Melliss
  • Isolepis monocephala Steud.
  • Isolepis nodosa (Rottb.) R.Br.
  • Scirpoides nodosa (Rottb.) Soják
  • Scirpoides nodosa (Rottb.) L.C.Br. ex R.T.F.Clifton
  • Scirpus atropurpureovaginatus Boeckeler
  • Scirpus globosus Spreng.
  • Scirpus glutinosus Banks & Sol. ex Hook.f.
  • Scirpus gracilis Rudge
  • Scirpus nodosus Rottb.
  • Scirpus nodosus var. macrostachya Benth.

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.