Lathyrus clymenumL.

cicercha purpurina

WFO wfo-0000212676 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Lathyrus clymenum, photographed by Christian Berg
fig. a Christian Berg, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-13 / obs. 198316450

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
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Accession
K000195745
Filed as
Lathyrus clymenum L.
Det. by
Willmott, R.A.
Collected
Pons, M.
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. We link to the digitised sheet rather than rehosting it, because the holding institutions do not serve their images to third parties reliably and we are not going to show you a picture we cannot actually deliver. 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 sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 21 botanical countries

Regions where Lathyrus clymenum is native: Algeria, Canary Is., Libya, Madeira, Morocco, Tunisia, East Aegean Is., Palestine, Türkiye, Albania, Baleares, Corse, France, Greece, Italy, Kriti, NW. Balkan Pen., Portugal, Sicilia, Spain, Türkiye-in-Europe AlgeriaLibyaMoroccoTunisiaEast Aegean Is.PalestineTürkiyeAlbaniaCorseFranceGreeceItalyKritiNW. Balkan Pen.PortugalSiciliaSpainTürkiye-in-Europe Canary Is.MadeiraBaleares
Native distribution of Lathyrus clymenum, 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
Albania ALB EUROPE
Baleares BAL
Corse COR
France FRA
Greece GRC
Italy ITA
Kriti KRI
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Portugal POR
Sicilia SIC
Spain SPA
Türkiye-in-Europe TUE
Algeria ALG AFRICA
Canary Is. CNY
Libya LBY
Madeira MDR
Morocco MOR
Tunisia TUN
East Aegean Is. EAI ASIA-TEMPERATE
Palestine PAL
Türkiye TUR

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 459 in flower of 460 examined

Proportion of examined Lathyrus clymenum in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 10 10 100% 72% to 100%
Feb 41 41 100% 91% to 100%
Mar 108 108 100% 97% to 100%
Apr 198 198 100% 98% to 100%
May 88 89 99% 94% to 100%
Jun 9 9 100% 70% to 100%
Jul 0 0 too few examined
Aug 0 0 too few examined
Sep 0 0 too few examined
Oct 0 0 too few examined
Nov 1 1 too few examined
Dec 4 4 too few examined

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Lathyrus clymenum 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. 459 of 460 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 6 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 1,976 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 1.3 °C 6.4 °C 12.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 22.9 °C 27.2 °C 32.6 °C
Annual rainfall 378 mm 698 mm 1,059 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 8 mm 44 mm 128 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 1,976 research-grade observations of Lathyrus clymenum 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 38 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.

  • Clymenum alatum (Ten.) Link
  • Clymenum tenuifolium (Desf.) Link
  • Clymenum uncinatum Moench
  • Clymenum uncinatum var. purpureum Alef.
  • Clymenum uncinatum var. vulgare Alef.
  • Lathyros clymenus (L.) St.-Lag.
  • Lathyrus alatus Sm.
  • Lathyrus alatus Ten.
  • Lathyrus articulatus Loisel.
  • Lathyrus articulatus subsp. clymenum (L.) Maire
  • Lathyrus articulatus subsp. euclymenum Maire
  • Lathyrus articulatus subsp. typicus Maire
  • Lathyrus articulatus var. latifolius Rouy
  • Lathyrus articulatus var. ligusticus Burnat
  • Lathyrus articulatus var. tenuifolius (Desf.) Rouy
  • Lathyrus auriculatus Bertol.
  • Lathyrus clymensum L.
  • Lathyrus clymenum subsp. tenuifolius (Desf.) Nyman
  • Lathyrus clymenum subvar. latifolius (Godr. & Gren.) Pérez Lara
  • Lathyrus clymenum var. angustifolius Rouy
  • Lathyrus clymenum var. latifolius Godr. & Gren.
  • Lathyrus clymenum var. tenuifolius Godr. & Gren.
  • Lathyrus clymenum var. tenuifolius (Desf.) Batt.
  • Lathyrus cornutus Biehler

and 14 more.

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.