Lateristachys lateralis

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Lateristachys lateralis, photographed by naturewatchwidow — fig. b naturewatchwidow, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 178188964

Lateristachys lateralis, photographed by Christopher Stephens — fig. c Christopher Stephens, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 148698934

Lateristachys lateralis, photographed by Andrew Thornhill — fig. d Andrew Thornhill, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 54998032

Lateristachys lateralis, photographed by Grzegorz Grzejszczak — fig. e Grzegorz Grzejszczak, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 13111189

Lateristachys lateralis, photographed by Brett Sandford — fig. f Brett Sandford, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 7811766

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 9 botanical countries

Native distribution of Lateristachys lateralis, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Chatham Is.	CTM	AUSTRALASIA
New South Wales	NSW
New Zealand North	NZN
New Zealand South	NZS
Queensland	QLD
South Australia	SOA
Tasmania	TAS
Victoria	VIC
New Caledonia	NWC	PACIFIC

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 197 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	1.7 °C	6.7 °C	12.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	17.5 °C	20.1 °C	25.4 °C
Annual rainfall	850 mm	1,876 mm	2,836 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	154 mm	351 mm	528 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 197 research-grade observations of Lateristachys lateralis 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 5 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.

Lepidotis lateralis (R.Br.) Rothm.
Lycopodiella lateralis (R.Br.) B.Øllg.
Lycopodium consimile Colenso
Lycopodium laterale R.Br.
Lycopodium laterale var. minus Spring

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.