Lathyrus digitatus

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Lathyrus digitatus, photographed by katunchik — fig. c katunchik, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 36395561

Lathyrus digitatus, photographed by Kostas Zontanos — fig. d Kostas Zontanos, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 11194835

Lathyrus digitatus, photographed by Максим Шумских — fig. e Максим Шумских, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 199301850

Lathyrus digitatus, photographed by Евгений Егорейченков — fig. f Евгений Егорейченков, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 123467169

Lathyrus digitatus, photographed by Sergey Cherkasov — fig. h Sergey Cherkasov, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 123377298

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 11 botanical countries

Native distribution of Lathyrus digitatus, 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
Albania	ALB	EUROPE
Bulgaria	BUL
Greece	GRC
Italy	ITA
Krym	KRY
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Türkiye-in-Europe	TUE
East Aegean Is.	EAI	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Lebanon-Syria	LBS
Türkiye	TUR
Libya	LBY	AFRICA

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 36 in flower of 37 examined

93%

100%

Proportion of examined Lathyrus digitatus in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	0	too few examined
Feb	0	0	too few examined
Mar	2	2	too few examined
Apr	13	14	93%	69% to 99%
May	18	18	100%	82% to 100%
Jun	3	3	too few examined
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	0	0	too few examined
Dec	0	0	too few examined

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Lathyrus digitatus 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. 36 of 37 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 10 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 192 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-5.4 °C	-0.7 °C	8.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	22.6 °C	25.2 °C	28.9 °C
Annual rainfall	507 mm	827 mm	1,115 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	21 mm	125 mm	184 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 192 research-grade observations of Lathyrus digitatus 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 21 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.

Lathyrus attenuatus Ten.
Lathyrus cyaneus subsp. digitatus (M.Bieb.) Ponert
Lathyrus cyaneus var. puberulus D.Jord.
Lathyrus cyaneus var. sessilifolius (Sm.) Trautv.
Lathyrus cyanus (Steven) K.Koch
Lathyrus digitatus f. freynii Širj.
Lathyrus digitatus subsp. tempskyanus (Freyn & Sint.) Širj.
Lathyrus digitatus var. puberulus (D.Jord.) Kožuharov
Lathyrus filiformis Čelak.
Lathyrus sessilifolius (Sm.) Ten.
Lathyrus sessilifolius var. longiflorus Čelak.
Lathyrus tempskyanus (Freyn & Sint.) K.Malý
Orobus canescens var. digitatus (M.Bieb.) Alef.
Orobus canescens var. sessilifolius (Sm.) Alef.
Orobus cyaneus Wahlenb.
Orobus digitatus M.Bieb.
Orobus sessiliflorus Sm. ex Ser.
Orobus sessilifolius Sm.
Orobus tempskyanus Freyn & Sint.
Platystylis sessilifolia (Sm.) Sweet
Spatulima angustifolia Raf.

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.