Lotus germanicus(Gremli) Peruzzi

WFO wfo-0000749685 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Lotus germanicus, photographed by Andreas Stiller
fig. a Andreas Stiller, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-13 / obs. 205797929
Lotus germanicus, photographed by Patrick Hacker
fig. b Patrick Hacker, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205095798
Lotus germanicus, photographed by Andreas Stiller
fig. c Andreas Stiller, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203810523
Lotus germanicus, photographed by Gabriel Mayrhofer
fig. d Gabriel Mayrhofer, CC0 1.0 / obs. 140030848
Lotus germanicus, photographed by Andreas Stiller
fig. e Andreas Stiller, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 139218460
Lotus germanicus, photographed by Andreas Stiller
fig. f Andreas Stiller, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 138970327
Lotus germanicus, photographed by Andreas Stiller
fig. g Andreas Stiller, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 135967925
Lotus germanicus, photographed by Christian Berg
fig. h Christian Berg, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 135533626

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 13 botanical countries

Regions where Lotus germanicus is native: Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Czechia-Slovakia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, NW. Balkan Pen., Poland, Romania, Switzerland, Türkiye-in-Europe AlbaniaAustriaBulgariaCzechia-SlovakiaGermanyGreeceHungaryItalyNW. Balkan Pen.PolandRomaniaSwitzerlandTürkiye-in-Europe
Native distribution of Lotus germanicus, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Albania ALB EUROPE
Austria AUT
Bulgaria BUL
Czechia-Slovakia CZE
Germany GER
Greece GRC
Hungary HUN
Italy ITA
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Poland POL
Romania ROM
Switzerland SWI
Türkiye-in-Europe TUE

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 83 in flower of 101 examined

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Lotus germanicus 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. 83 of 101 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 9 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 651 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -7.1 °C -3.8 °C -3.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 21.3 °C 24.6 °C 26.0 °C
Annual rainfall 536 mm 728 mm 1,844 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 78 mm 125 mm 315 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 651 research-grade observations of Lotus germanicus 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 8 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.

  • Dorycnium germanicum (Gremli) Rikli
  • Dorycnium jordanii subsp. germanicum Gremli
  • Dorycnium pentaphyllum subsp. germanicum (Gremli) Gams
  • Dorycnium pentaphyllum var. sericeum Neilr.
  • Dorycnium stenophyllum Schur
  • Dorycnium suffruticosum f. germanicum (Gremli) Rouy
  • Dorycnium suffruticosum var. germanicum (Gremli) Burnat
  • Dorycnium suffruticosum var. sericeum (Neilr.) Beck

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.