Medicago arabica(L.) Huds.

Spotted medick

WFO wfo-0000213417 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Medicago arabica, photographed by Daniel Cahen
fig. a Daniel Cahen, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-12 / obs. 205521734
Medicago arabica, photographed by Daniel Cahen
fig. b Daniel Cahen, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205531791
Medicago arabica, photographed by Jean-Paul Boerekamps
fig. c Jean-Paul Boerekamps, CC0 1.0 / obs. 204895829
Medicago arabica, photographed by Thierry Helminger
fig. d Thierry Helminger, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205138281
Medicago arabica, photographed by David Carey
fig. e David Carey, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203370525
Medicago arabica, photographed by Daniel Cahen
fig. f Daniel Cahen, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205545637
Medicago arabica, photographed by Daniel Cahen
fig. g Daniel Cahen, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 202815828
Medicago arabica, photographed by Daniel Cahen
fig. h Daniel Cahen, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 202827074

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.

Confused withby our own model

These are not lookalikes we guessed at. Each one is a species our identification model genuinely mistook for this plant, and how many times. The error rate is published.

Flowering n = 698 observations

Peak flowering in Apr, from 698 community-annotated observations worldwide. This is a global aggregate, not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres, and citizen-science records cluster near cities, at weekends, and in spring. Where a species has fewer than 30 annotated records we do not draw this chart at all.

Also published as 21 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.

  • Medica arabica (L.) Medik.
  • Medica echinata Lam.
  • Medica maculata Bubani
  • Medicago arabica f. elegans Kožuharov
  • Medicago arabica f. heptacycla Urb.
  • Medicago arabica f. pastoralis Kožuharov
  • Medicago arabica f. purpurea Burkart
  • Medicago arabica subsp. inermis Ricker
  • Medicago arabica var. longispina Rouy
  • Medicago arabica var. maculata Maire
  • Medicago arabica var. minor Lojac. & Pojark.
  • Medicago cordata Desr.
  • Medicago coronata Pall. ex M.Bieb.
  • Medicago maculata Hook. & Arn.
  • Medicago maculata Willd.
  • Medicago maculata Sibth.
  • Medicago maculata var. tetraphylla Desp.
  • Medicago maculata var. tetraphylla N.H.F.Desp.
  • Medicago oxalioides Schur
  • Medicago polymorpha var. arabica L.
  • Medicago talyschensis Latsch.

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.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice, no toxicity claim and no native range, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.