Thelymitra cyanea (Veined sun orchid)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Thelymitra cyanea, photographed by Linda Groom — fig. a Linda Groom, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-01-17 / obs. 176638933

Thelymitra cyanea, photographed by darmozrac — fig. c darmozrac, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 179355582

Thelymitra cyanea, photographed by Hayden Jones — fig. d Hayden Jones, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 175363158

Thelymitra cyanea, photographed by Cowirrie — fig. e Cowirrie, CC0 1.0 / obs. 176512145

Thelymitra cyanea, photographed by Christopher Stephens — fig. f Christopher Stephens, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 174649725

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 8 botanical countries

Native distribution of Thelymitra cyanea, 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
Antipodean Is.	ATP	AUSTRALASIA
Chatham Is.	CTM
New South Wales	NSW
New Zealand North	NZN
New Zealand South	NZS
South Australia	SOA
Tasmania	TAS
Victoria	VIC

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 563 in flower of 580 examined

98%

100%

67%

100%

96%

Proportion of examined Thelymitra cyanea in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	349	357	98%	96% to 99%
Feb	43	43	100%	92% to 100%
Mar	4	6	67%	30% to 90%
Apr	0	0	too few examined
May	0	0	too few examined
Jun	0	0	too few examined
Jul	0	0	too few examined
Aug	0	0	too few examined
Sep	0	0	too few examined
Oct	0	0	too few examined
Nov	8	8	100%	68% to 100%
Dec	159	166	96%	92% to 98%

Peak flowering in Feb. Each bar is the share of Thelymitra cyanea 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. 563 of 580 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 7 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.

Also published as 4 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.

Macdonaldia cyanea Lindl.
Thelymitra uniflora Hook.f.
Thelymitra venosa var. cedricsmithii Hatch
Thelymitra venosa var. cyanea (Lindl.) Hatch

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.