Panicum miliaceum (broomcorn millet)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Panicum miliaceum, photographed by Dmitriy Bochkov — fig. a Dmitriy Bochkov, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-08-30 / obs. 154310253

Panicum miliaceum, photographed by Tim Johnson — fig. c Tim Johnson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 181561067

Panicum miliaceum, photographed by Patrick Hacker — fig. e Patrick Hacker, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 152415349

Panicum miliaceum, photographed by Марина Садыкова — fig. f Марина Садыкова, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 150754727

Panicum miliaceum, photographed by Cleveland Powell — fig. g Cleveland Powell, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 136031004

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: 1769178
Filed as: Panicum miliaceum L.
Det. by: S. J. Smith 1951-01-01
Collected: G. W. Clinton 1864
Origin: US
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. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. 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 herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 9 botanical countries

Native distribution of Panicum miliaceum, 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
Bangladesh	BAN	ASIA-TROPICAL
East Himalaya	EHM
India	IND
Maldives	MDV
Myanmar	MYA
Nepal	NEP
Pakistan	PAK
Sri Lanka	SRL
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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 1,401 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-19.3 °C	-4.1 °C	6.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	19.6 °C	23.9 °C	33.1 °C
Annual rainfall	376 mm	668 mm	1,189 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	29 mm	113 mm	211 mm

It is found where winters are severely cold. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,401 research-grade observations of Panicum miliaceum 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 36 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.

Leptoloma miliaceum (L.) Smyth
Milium esculentum Moench
Milium panicum Mill.
Panicum asperrimum Fisch.
Panicum asperrimum Fischer ex Jacq.
Panicum densepilosum Steud.
Panicum miliaceum subsp. agricola H.Scholz & Mikoláš
Panicum miliaceum subsp. miliaceum
Panicum miliaceum subsp. ruderale (Kitag.) Tzvelev
Panicum miliaceum var. aerugineum Krassavin & Uljanova
Panicum miliaceum var. album Alef.
Panicum miliaceum var. anthracinum Krassavin & Uljanova
Panicum miliaceum var. aquilum Krassavin & Uljanova
Panicum miliaceum var. atrobrunneum Krassavin & Uljanova
Panicum miliaceum var. aureum Alef.
Panicum miliaceum var. cinereum Alef.
Panicum miliaceum var. coffeatum Krassavin & Uljanova
Panicum miliaceum var. corsinum Krassavin & Uljanova
Panicum miliaceum var. densobrunneum Agaf.
Panicum miliaceum var. fuscum Krassavin & Uljanova
Panicum miliaceum var. glaucum Krassavin & Uljanova
Panicum miliaceum var. leucospermum N.H.F.Desp.
Panicum miliaceum var. miliaceum
Panicum miliaceum var. nicotianum Krassavin & Uljanova

and 12 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.