Luzula nivea | BotanAI

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Luzula nivea, photographed by Tim Johnson — fig. a Tim Johnson, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-10 / obs. 205152881

Luzula nivea, photographed by Marco Mussita — fig. b Marco Mussita, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205091430

Luzula nivea, photographed by Julien Lepage — fig. d Julien Lepage, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 196489562

Luzula nivea, photographed by Ben Costamagna — fig. e Ben Costamagna, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 150443748

Luzula nivea, photographed by Eleftherios Katsillis — fig. f Eleftherios Katsillis, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 132565602

Luzula nivea, photographed by Jason Grant — fig. g Jason Grant, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 99082451

Luzula nivea, photographed by Andrea Meucci — fig. h Andrea Meucci, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 95566393

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 7 botanical countries

Native distribution of Luzula nivea, 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
Austria	AUT	EUROPE
France	FRA
Germany	GER
Italy	ITA
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Spain	SPA
Switzerland	SWI

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 110 in flower of 133 examined

100%

94%

26%

Proportion of examined Luzula nivea in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	0	too few examined
Feb	0	0	too few examined
Mar	1	2	too few examined
Apr	2	3	too few examined
May	22	22	100%	85% to 100%
Jun	49	52	94%	84% to 98%
Jul	31	33	94%	80% to 98%
Aug	5	19	26%	12% to 49%
Sep	0	1	too few examined
Oct	0	0	too few examined
Nov	0	1	too few examined
Dec	0	0	too few examined

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Luzula nivea 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. 110 of 133 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 1,344 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-13.5 °C	-5.5 °C	-0.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	16.5 °C	21.4 °C	26.6 °C
Annual rainfall	854 mm	1,311 mm	2,044 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	118 mm	201 mm	360 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 1,344 research-grade observations of Luzula nivea 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 11 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.

Juncoides nivea (L.) Kuntze
Juncus niveus Leers
Juncus niveus L.
Luzula nivea subvar. livida (Desv.) Rouy
Luzula nivea subvar. rubella (Mert. & W.D.J.Koch) Rouy
Luzula nivea unranked angustata Asch. & Graebn.
Luzula nivea var. angustata (Asch. & Graebn.) Rouy
Luzula nivea var. livida Desv.
Luzula nivea var. minuta Beyer
Luzula nivea var. rubella Mert. & W.D.J.Koch
Luzula nivea var. rubescens Favrat

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.