Lotus herbaceus

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Lotus herbaceus, photographed by Christian Berg — fig. c Christian Berg, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 135543174

Lotus herbaceus, photographed by Сергей Крыленко — fig. d Сергей Крыленко, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 76132719

Lotus herbaceus, photographed by Irene Saltini — fig. f Irene Saltini, CC0 1.0 / obs. 48063101

Lotus herbaceus, photographed by Emanuele Santarelli — fig. g Emanuele Santarelli, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 44641164

Lotus herbaceus, photographed by carnifex — fig. h carnifex, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 19592949

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 20 botanical countries

Native distribution of Lotus herbaceus, 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
Albania	ALB	EUROPE
Baleares	BAL
Bulgaria	BUL
Corse	COR
Czechia-Slovakia	CZE
France	FRA
Greece	GRC
Italy	ITA
Krym	KRY
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Sardegna	SAR
Sicilia	SIC
Spain	SPA
Türkiye-in-Europe	TUE
Ukraine	UKR
Iran	IRN	ASIA-TEMPERATE
North Caucasus	NCS
Transcaucasus	TCS
Türkiye	TUR
Algeria	ALG	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 66 in flower of 83 examined

50%

81%

93%

91%

Proportion of examined Lotus herbaceus in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	4	too few examined
Feb	0	1	too few examined
Mar	0	0	too few examined
Apr	3	6	50%	19% to 81%
May	13	16	81%	57% to 93%
Jun	28	30	93%	79% to 98%
Jul	20	22	91%	72% to 97%
Aug	2	3	too few examined
Sep	0	0	too few examined
Oct	0	1	too few examined
Nov	0	0	too few examined
Dec	0	0	too few examined

Peak flowering in Jun. Each bar is the share of Lotus herbaceus 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. 66 of 83 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 8 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 799 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-5.8 °C	-2.1 °C	2.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	22.2 °C	25.5 °C	27.7 °C
Annual rainfall	610 mm	884 mm	1,792 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	96 mm	165 mm	316 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 799 research-grade observations of Lotus herbaceus 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 47 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.

Bonjeanea cinerascens Jord. & Fourr.
Bonjeanea hirsuta var. italica (Jord.) Rouy
Bonjeanea hirsuta var. prostrata (Jord. & Fourr.) Rouy
Bonjeanea italica Jord.
Bonjeanea prostrata Jord. & Fourr.
Bonjeanea sericea (Sweet) Jord. & Fourr.
Bonjeanea syriaca Boiss.
Dorycnium affine Jord.
Dorycnium amani Zohary
Dorycnium crantzii (Vis.) Brand
Dorycnium decumbens Jord.
Dorycnium diffusum Janka
Dorycnium gracile Jord.
Dorycnium herbaceum Vill.
Dorycnium herbaceum subsp. gracile (Jord.) Nyman
Dorycnium herbaceum subsp. intermedium (Ledeb.) P.Fourn.
Dorycnium herbaceum subsp. sabaudum (Rchb.) Nyman
Dorycnium herbaceum var. decumbens (Jord.) P.Fourn.
Dorycnium herbaceum var. macedonicum (Degen & Dörfl.) Kuzmanov
Dorycnium hirsutum f. italicum (Jord.) Bolzon
Dorycnium hirsutum var. italicum (Jord.) Fiori
Dorycnium hirsutum var. prostratum (Jord. & Fourr.) Cout.
Dorycnium intermedium Ledeb.
Dorycnium intermedium var. macedonicum Degen & Dörfl.

and 23 more.

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.