Madia gracilis (grassy tarweed)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Madia gracilis, photographed by Ken-ichi Ueda — fig. a Ken-ichi Ueda, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-11 / obs. 205966273

Madia gracilis, photographed by Millie Basden — fig. b Millie Basden, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 191422350

Madia gracilis, photographed by George Williams — fig. c George Williams, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 189036906

Madia gracilis, photographed by Arvel Hernandez — fig. d Arvel Hernandez, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 188684764

Madia gracilis, photographed by joergmlpts — fig. e joergmlpts, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 187791019

Madia gracilis, photographed by Alexander Wentworth — fig. f Alexander Wentworth, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 180323015

Madia gracilis, photographed by mark-groeneveld — fig. g mark-groeneveld, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 149754220

Madia gracilis, photographed by Randal — fig. h Randal, CC0 1.0 / obs. 132351213

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.

Flowering 427 in flower of 480 examined

67%

94%

91%

85%

91%

38%

83%

Proportion of examined Madia gracilis in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	1	too few examined
Feb	0	1	too few examined
Mar	6	9	67%	35% to 88%
Apr	143	152	94%	89% to 97%
May	173	191	91%	86% to 94%
Jun	76	89	85%	77% to 91%
Jul	21	23	91%	73% to 98%
Aug	3	8	38%	14% to 69%
Sep	5	6	83%	44% to 97%
Oct	0	0	too few examined
Nov	0	0	too few examined
Dec	0	0	too few examined

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Madia gracilis 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. 427 of 480 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 5 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 1,980 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-5.2 °C	3.8 °C	6.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	20.1 °C	28.1 °C	33.4 °C
Annual rainfall	380 mm	785 mm	1,593 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	4 mm	9 mm	97 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 1,980 research-grade observations of Madia gracilis 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 1 synonym

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.

Madia dissitiflora Torr. & A.Gray

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.

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. It has no native range either: Kew's checklist does not cover this taxon.