Medicago marina

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Medicago marina, photographed by Alessia Guggisberg — fig. b Alessia Guggisberg, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 189868025

Medicago marina, photographed by bigayon — fig. c bigayon, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 190301024

Medicago marina, photographed by Davide Puddu — fig. d Davide Puddu, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 187909996

Medicago marina, photographed by Andre Hosper — fig. e Andre Hosper, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 187745771

Medicago marina, photographed by Marc Riera — fig. h Marc Riera, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 187457939

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 29 botanical countries

Native distribution of Medicago marina, 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
France	FRA
Greece	GRC
Italy	ITA
Kriti	KRI
Krym	KRY
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Portugal	POR
Romania	ROM
Sardegna	SAR
Sicilia	SIC
Spain	SPA
Ukraine	UKR
Cyprus	CYP	ASIA-TEMPERATE
East Aegean Is.	EAI
Lebanon-Syria	LBS
Palestine	PAL
Sinai	SIN
Transcaucasus	TCS
Türkiye	TUR
Algeria	ALG	AFRICA
Canary Is.	CNY
Egypt	EGY
Libya	LBY
Morocco	MOR
Tunisia	TUN

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 223 in flower of 291 examined

13%

50%

96%

84%

81%

33%

43%

17%

Proportion of examined Medicago marina in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	1	8	13%	2% to 47%
Feb	7	14	50%	27% to 73%
Mar	49	51	96%	87% to 99%
Apr	95	99	96%	90% to 98%
May	49	58	84%	73% to 92%
Jun	13	16	81%	57% to 93%
Jul	4	12	33%	14% to 61%
Aug	3	7	43%	16% to 75%
Sep	0	10	0%	0% to 28%
Oct	1	6	17%	3% to 56%
Nov	0	6	0%	0% to 39%
Dec	1	4	too few examined

Peak flowering in Mar. Each bar is the share of Medicago marina 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. 223 of 291 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. One month has fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for it. 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 1,998 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	4.0 °C	8.3 °C	11.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	21.5 °C	26.3 °C	30.3 °C
Annual rainfall	267 mm	674 mm	1,449 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	4 mm	60 mm	142 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,998 research-grade observations of Medicago marina 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 9 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 marina (L.) Lam.
Medica maritima Bubani
Medica tomentosa Moench
Medicago marina f. tuberculata (Rouy) Asch. & Graebn.
Medicago marina var. inermis Rouy
Medicago marina var. tuberculata Rouy
Medicago maritima Pall. ex Georgi
Medicago murex var. inermis Rouy
Medicago murex var. tuberculata Rouy

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.