Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations
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
- 04115974
- Filed as
- Pogonatum contortum (Menzies ex Brid.) Lesq.
- Det. by
- J. A. Harpel 2015-01-01
- Collected
- S. S. Talbot 2015-08-26
- 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.
Where it actually grows measured, from 510 observations
| Condition | 5th percentile | Median | 95th percentile |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coldest month, mean daily low | -3.0 °C | -0.3 °C | 4.1 °C |
| Warmest month, mean daily high | 15.7 °C | 22.0 °C | 24.7 °C |
| Annual rainfall | 2,012 mm | 3,158 mm | 4,080 mm |
| Rainfall in the driest quarter | 191 mm | 319 mm | 484 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 510 research-grade observations of Pogonatum contortum 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 Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.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 16 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.
- Atrichum contortum (Menzies ex Brid.) Kindb.
- Catharinella atrovirens (Mitt.) Kindb.
- Catharinella contorta (Menzies ex Brid.) Kindb.
- Catharinella erythrodontia (Kindb.) Kindb.
- Pogonatum asperrimum Besch.
- Pogonatum atrovirens Mitt.
- Pogonatum contortum var. elatum Sakurai
- Pogonatum contortum var. pallidum (Lindb.) Paris
- Pogonatum erythrodontium Kindb.
- Pogonatum laterale Brid.
- Pogonatum laterale Schimp.
- Polytrichum asperrimum (Besch.) Broth.
- Polytrichum atrovirens (Mitt.) Kindb.
- Polytrichum contortum Menzies ex Brid.
- Polytrichum contortum var. pallidum Lindb.
- Polytrichum laterale Brid.
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.
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. It has no native range either: Kew's checklist does not cover this taxon.