Onobrychis viciifoliaScop.

EsparcetHoly-cloverSainfoincommon sainfoinsainfoin

WFO wfo-0000205013 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Onobrychis viciifolia, photographed by Nico
fig. a Nico, CC0 1.0 / 2022-06-05 / obs. 204177433
Onobrychis viciifolia, photographed by Aleksei Baushev
fig. b Aleksei Baushev, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203322135
Onobrychis viciifolia, photographed by Tobias Schönberg
fig. c Tobias Schönberg, CC0 1.0 / obs. 202261200
Onobrychis viciifolia, photographed by Tobias Schönberg
fig. d Tobias Schönberg, CC0 1.0 / obs. 202261499
Onobrychis viciifolia, photographed by Rich Cassidy
fig. e Rich Cassidy, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 200756948
Onobrychis viciifolia, photographed by Jeff Jones
fig. f Jeff Jones, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 197799842
Onobrychis viciifolia, photographed by Pavel Kacl
fig. g Pavel Kacl, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 197503974
Onobrychis viciifolia, photographed by Petra Caltová
fig. h Petra Caltová, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 197046160

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 9 botanical countries

Regions where Onobrychis viciifolia is native: Austria, Bulgaria, Czechia-Slovakia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, NW. Balkan Pen., Romania AustriaBulgariaCzechia-SlovakiaFranceGermanyGreeceHungaryNW. Balkan Pen.Romania
Native distribution of Onobrychis viciifolia, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Austria AUT EUROPE
Bulgaria BUL
Czechia-Slovakia CZE
France FRA
Germany GER
Greece GRC
Hungary HUN
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Romania ROM

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 1,008 in flower of 1,033 examined

Peak flowering in Sep. Each bar is the share of Onobrychis viciifolia 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. 1,008 of 1,033 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 4 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 1,986 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -13.7 °C -3.4 °C 2.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 18.9 °C 23.3 °C 28.6 °C
Annual rainfall 442 mm 722 mm 1,378 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 51 mm 135 mm 264 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 1,986 research-grade observations of Onobrychis viciifolia 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 51 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.

  • Hedysarum collinum Salisb.
  • Hedysarum echinatum Gilib.
  • Hedysarum montanum Pers.
  • Hedysarum onobrychioides Winkl.
  • Hedysarum onobrychis L.
  • Hedysarum onobrychis L.
  • Hedysarum onobrychis var. canone S.L.Welsh
  • Onobrychis alba Boreau
  • Onobrychis bifera (Alef.) Coulot & Rabaute
  • Onobrychis collina Jord.
  • Onobrychis esponellae Sennen
  • Onobrychis glabra Desv.
  • Onobrychis incana Gueldenst.
  • Onobrychis onobrychis (L.) H.Karst.
  • Onobrychis pallens Láng ex Neilr.
  • Onobrychis pallescens Schur
  • Onobrychis procumbens Fisch. ex Schrank
  • Onobrychis sativa Lam.
  • Onobrychis sativa var. bifera Alef.
  • Onobrychis sativa var. calvescens Schur
  • Onobrychis sativa var. communis Alef.
  • Onobrychis sativa var. culta W.D.J.Koch
  • Onobrychis sativa var. hirsuta Schur
  • Onobrychis sativa var. pseudosupina Ball

and 27 more.

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.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. 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.