Medicago orbicularis (blackdisk medick)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Medicago orbicularis, photographed by Annika Lindqvist — fig. a Annika Lindqvist, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-11 / obs. 205577287

Medicago orbicularis, photographed by Noa — fig. b Noa, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 200454467

Medicago orbicularis, photographed by Rafael Medina — fig. c Rafael Medina, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 199396734

Medicago orbicularis, photographed by scolym — fig. d scolym, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 199190065

Medicago orbicularis, photographed by Josep Gesti — fig. e Josep Gesti, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 198896126

Medicago orbicularis, photographed by Tim Johnson — fig. f Tim Johnson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 197550347

Medicago orbicularis, photographed by Christian Berg — fig. g Christian Berg, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 198314581

Medicago orbicularis, photographed by Santiago Martín-Bravo — fig. h Santiago Martín-Bravo, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 194832322

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: 04814704
Filed as: Medicago orbicularis (L.) Bartal.
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. We link to the digitised sheet rather than rehosting it, because the holding institutions do not serve their images to third parties reliably and we are not going to show you a picture we cannot actually deliver. 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 sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 44 botanical countries

Native distribution of Medicago orbicularis, 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
Afghanistan	AFG	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Cyprus	CYP
East Aegean Is.	EAI
Iran	IRN
Iraq	IRQ
Kazakhstan	KAZ
Kirgizstan	KGZ
Lebanon-Syria	LBS
North Caucasus	NCS
Palestine	PAL
Saudi Arabia	SAU
Sinai	SIN
Tadzhikistan	TZK
Transcaucasus	TCS
Türkiye	TUR
Turkmenistan	TKM
Uzbekistan	UZB
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
Algeria	ALG	AFRICA
Canary Is.	CNY
Egypt	EGY
Eritrea	ERI
Ethiopia	ETH
Libya	LBY
Madeira	MDR
Morocco	MOR
Tunisia	TUN
Zimbabwe	ZIM
Pakistan	PAK	ASIA-TROPICAL
West Himalaya	WHM

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 36 in flower of 303 examined

20%

50%

14%

12%

14%

Proportion of examined Medicago orbicularis in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	1	5	20%	4% to 62%
Feb	4	8	50%	22% to 78%
Mar	5	37	14%	6% to 28%
Apr	13	106	12%	7% to 20%
May	13	96	14%	8% to 22%
Jun	0	25	0%	0% to 13%
Jul	0	8	0%	0% to 32%
Aug	0	5	0%	0% to 43%
Sep	0	4	too few examined
Oct	0	0	too few examined
Nov	0	3	too few examined
Dec	0	6	0%	0% to 39%

Peak flowering in Feb. Each bar is the share of Medicago orbicularis 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. 36 of 303 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 3 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 1,997 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-1.8 °C	3.4 °C	10.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	24.5 °C	29.0 °C	34.7 °C
Annual rainfall	426 mm	759 mm	1,190 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	3 mm	91 mm	196 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 1,997 research-grade observations of Medicago orbicularis 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 43 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 inermis Lam.
Medica orbicularis (L.) Medik.
Medica orbiculata Bubani
Medicago ambigua Jord. ex Boreau
Medicago applanata Willd. ex Hornem.
Medicago applanata Hornem.
Medicago biancae (Tod. ex Urb.) P.Silva
Medicago clypeata Lindl.
Medicago cuneata J.Woods
Medicago echinata Steud.
Medicago marginata Willd.
Medicago orbicularis (L.) All.
Medicago orbicularis f. applanata Costa
Medicago orbicularis f. biancae (Tod. ex Urb.) Urb.
Medicago orbicularis f. canescens Urb.
Medicago orbicularis f. glanduligera Kožuharov
Medicago orbicularis f. glandulosa Urb.
Medicago orbicularis f. macrocarpa (Rouy) Casellas
Medicago orbicularis f. pilosa Benth.
Medicago orbicularis f. praecox Sinskaya
Medicago orbicularis f. rubra Sinskaya
Medicago orbicularis f. tardifolia Sinskaya
Medicago orbicularis f. viridis Sinskaya
Medicago orbicularis prol. marginata (Willd.) Rouy

and 19 more.

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.