Luzula congesta (heath woodrush)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 4 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 4 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Luzula congesta, photographed by Penelope Noel Gillette — fig. a Penelope Noel Gillette, CC BY 4.0 / 2020-11-11 / obs. 104049948

Luzula congesta, photographed by Piermario Maculan — fig. c Piermario Maculan, CC0 1.0 / obs. 205198829

Luzula congesta, photographed by Jamie O'Neill — fig. e Jamie O'Neill, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 202903102

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: The New York Botanical Garden
Accession: 3737221
Filed as: Luzula congesta (Thuill.) Lej.
Det. by: not recorded on this sheet
Collected: not recorded
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. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. 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 herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 14 botanical countries

Native distribution of Luzula congesta, 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
Belgium	BGM	EUROPE
Denmark	DEN
Føroyar	FOR
France	FRA
Germany	GER
Great Britain	GRB
Iceland	ICE
Ireland	IRE
Netherlands	NET
Norway	NOR
Poland	POL
Portugal	POR
Spain	SPA
Sweden	SWE

Not drawn on the map: Great Britain. We hold no public-domain boundary for this region, so it is listed rather than guessed at.

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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 182 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-3.0 °C	1.4 °C	7.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	15.5 °C	19.7 °C	23.0 °C
Annual rainfall	667 mm	1,094 mm	2,356 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	138 mm	217 mm	387 mm

It is found where winters bring light 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 182 research-grade observations of Luzula congesta 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.

Also published as 19 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.

Juncus campestris var. strictus Retz.
Juncus congestus Thuill.
Juncus liniger W.With.
Luciola congesta (Thuill.) Sm.
Luzula campestris subsp. congesta (Thuill.) K.Richt.
Luzula campestris var. congesta (Thuill.) E.Mey.
Luzula campestris var. congesta (Thuill.) Bicheno
Luzula campestris var. hornemannii Blytt
Luzula campestris var. pallens Merino
Luzula congesta var. glabra DC.
Luzula congesta var. subglabra DC.
Luzula erecta prol. congesta (Thuill.) Rouy
Luzula erecta var. congesta (Thuill.) Desv.
Luzula intermedia var. congesta (Thuill.) Spenn.
Luzula multiflora f. congesta (Thuill.) Neuman
Luzula multiflora subsp. congesta (Thuill.) Hyl.
Luzula multiflora subsp. congesta (Thuill.) Arcang.
Luzula multiflora var. congesta (Thuill.) W.D.J.Koch
Luzula spicata var. latifolia Losa

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.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.