Oloptum thomasii

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Oloptum thomasii, photographed by Pavel Kacl — fig. b Pavel Kacl, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 158871758

Oloptum thomasii, photographed by Paul Bell-Butler — fig. d Paul Bell-Butler, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 107142573

Oloptum thomasii, photographed by Stephen Thorpe — fig. e Stephen Thorpe, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 58905923

Oloptum thomasii, photographed by Joe Potter Butler — fig. f Joe Potter Butler, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 31326185

Oloptum thomasii, photographed by Daniel Cahen — fig. g Daniel Cahen, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 28327198

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 16 botanical countries

Native distribution of Oloptum thomasii, 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
Baleares	BAL	EUROPE
Greece	GRC
Italy	ITA
Kriti	KRI
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Sardegna	SAR
Sicilia	SIC
Spain	SPA
Cyprus	CYP	ASIA-TEMPERATE
East Aegean Is.	EAI
Lebanon-Syria	LBS
Palestine	PAL
Türkiye	TUR
Algeria	ALG	AFRICA
Egypt	EGY
Morocco	MOR

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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 296 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	2.4 °C	6.5 °C	10.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	20.4 °C	25.7 °C	31.8 °C
Annual rainfall	636 mm	977 mm	1,376 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	5 mm	131 mm	255 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 296 research-grade observations of Oloptum thomasii 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.

Also published as 10 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.

Achnatherum thomasii (Duby) F.M.Vázquez & Barkworth
Milium thomasii Duby
Oryzopsis miliacea f. thomasii (Duby) Asch. & Graebn.
Oryzopsis miliacea subsp. thomasii (Duby) K.Richt.
Oryzopsis thomasii (Duby) P.Silva
Piptatherum miliaceum subsp. thomasii (Duby) Soják
Piptatherum miliaceum var. thomasii (Duby) Boiss.
Piptatherum multiflorum subsp. thomasii (Duby) Nyman
Piptatherum thomasii (Duby) Kunth
Urachne thomasii (Duby) Steud.

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.