Secale cereale (Rye)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Secale cereale, photographed by Matt Lavin — fig. a Matt Lavin, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-06-19 / obs. 153345892

Secale cereale, photographed by thomas_oswald — fig. c thomas_oswald, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 133528655

Secale cereale, photographed by Dilrukshan Priyantha Wijesinghe — fig. d Dilrukshan Priyantha Wijesinghe, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 128747793

Secale cereale, photographed by Syd Cannings — fig. e Syd Cannings, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 88154140

Secale cereale, photographed by Robert H. Wardell — fig. f Robert H. Wardell, CC0 1.0 / obs. 81559048

Secale cereale, photographed by Reid Hardin — fig. g Reid Hardin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 45988522

Secale cereale, photographed by Robbie Hannawacker — fig. h Robbie Hannawacker, CC0 1.0 / obs. 19613491

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 1 botanical country

Native distribution of Secale cereale, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Türkiye	TUR	ASIA-TEMPERATE

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 1,064 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-15.6 °C	-6.1 °C	6.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	21.3 °C	26.2 °C	34.6 °C
Annual rainfall	329 mm	659 mm	1,220 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	27 mm	104 mm	228 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 1,064 research-grade observations of Secale cereale 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 46 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.

Secale aestivum Uspenski
Secale ancestrale (Zhuk.) Zhuk.
Secale ancestrale var. aidinum Zhuk.
Secale ancestrale var. arenosum Zhuk.
Secale ancestrale var. karaburun Zhuk.
Secale ancestrale var. spontaneum Zhuk.
Secale arundinaceum Trautv.
Secale cereale f. brevispicatum (Waisb.) Soó
Secale cereale f. montaniforme (Waisb.) Soó
Secale cereale subsp. aestivum Schübl. & G.Martens
Secale cereale subsp. aestivum Schübl. & G.Martens
Secale cereale subsp. ancestrale Zhuk.
Secale cereale subsp. indo-europaeum Antrop.
Secale cereale subsp. indoeuropaeum Antrop.
Secale cereale subsp. rigidum Antrop.
Secale cereale subsp. tetraploidum Kobyl.
Secale cereale subsp. tsitsinii Kobyl.
Secale cereale var. ancestrale (Zhuk.) Kit Tan
Secale cereale var. arduennense Lej.
Secale cereale var. arundinaceum (Trautv.) Peterm.
Secale cereale var. biflorum Peterm.
Secale cereale var. compositum Koeler
Secale cereale var. hybernum Aiton
Secale cereale var. multicaule Metzg. ex Alef.

and 22 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.