Lotus australis

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Lotus australis, photographed by Kym Nicolson — fig. b Kym Nicolson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 164996427

Lotus australis, photographed by Kai Squires — fig. c Kai Squires, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 64424140

Lotus australis, photographed by corunastylis — fig. d corunastylis, CC0 1.0 / obs. 42104788

Lotus australis, photographed by Rolf Lawrenz — fig. f Rolf Lawrenz, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 23999046

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 8 botanical countries

Native distribution of Lotus australis, 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
New South Wales	NSW	AUSTRALASIA
Queensland	QLD
South Australia	SOA
Tasmania	TAS
Victoria	VIC
Western Australia	WAU
Bismarck Archipelago	BIS	ASIA-TROPICAL
New Guinea	NWG

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 94 in flower of 97 examined

100%

93%

94%

Proportion of examined Lotus australis in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	10	10	100%	72% to 100%
Feb	5	5	100%	57% to 100%
Mar	2	2	too few examined
Apr	2	2	too few examined
May	3	3	too few examined
Jun	2	2	too few examined
Jul	2	2	too few examined
Aug	2	2	too few examined
Sep	9	9	100%	70% to 100%
Oct	13	13	100%	77% to 100%
Nov	27	29	93%	78% to 98%
Dec	17	18	94%	74% to 99%

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Lotus australis 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. 94 of 97 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.

Also published as 12 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.

Lotus albidus T.Moore
Lotus australis f. subhirsuta Domin
Lotus australis var. angustifoliolus DC.
Lotus australis var. laevigatus (Benth.) Domin
Lotus australis var. longifolius Domin
Lotus australis var. maritimus Domin
Lotus australis var. normalis Domin
Lotus australis var. pubescens Benth.
Lotus australis var. vestitus Domin
Lotus candolleanus Sweet
Lotus laevigatus Benth.
Lotus obovatus Sweet

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.