Triticum aestivumL.

common wheat

WFO wfo-0000905667 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Triticum aestivum, photographed by mefisher
fig. a mefisher, CC0 1.0 / 2022-06-09 / obs. 204655877
Triticum aestivum, photographed by Ryan Sorrells
fig. b Ryan Sorrells, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203403598
Triticum aestivum, photographed by Yann Kemper
fig. c Yann Kemper, CC0 1.0 / obs. 202488260
Triticum aestivum, photographed by Jeff Clark
fig. d Jeff Clark, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 201890469
Triticum aestivum, photographed by Pavel Kacl
fig. e Pavel Kacl, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 201506403
Triticum aestivum, photographed by Josiah Londerée
fig. f Josiah Londerée, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 189060778
Triticum aestivum, photographed by Daniel S.
fig. g Daniel S., CC BY 4.0 / obs. 181482092
Triticum aestivum, photographed by Matt Lavin
fig. h Matt Lavin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 158838359

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
1745566
Filed as
Triticum aestivum L.
Det. by
D. E. Atha 2013-01-01
Collected
D. E. Atha 2012-04-12
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 8 botanical countries

Regions where Triticum aestivum is native: Iran, Lebanon-Syria, Palestine, Transcaucasus, Türkiye, India, Pakistan, West Himalaya IranLebanon-SyriaPalestineTranscaucasusTürkiyeIndiaPakistanWest Himalaya
Native distribution of Triticum aestivum, 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
Iran IRN ASIA-TEMPERATE
Lebanon-Syria LBS
Palestine PAL
Transcaucasus TCS
Türkiye TUR
India IND ASIA-TROPICAL
Pakistan PAK
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.

Flowering 129 in flower of 498 examined

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Triticum aestivum 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. 129 of 498 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. One month has fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for it. 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 2,030 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -13.1 °C -3.1 °C 6.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 19.2 °C 24.3 °C 33.6 °C
Annual rainfall 458 mm 773 mm 1,440 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 20 mm 128 mm 272 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 2,030 research-grade observations of Triticum aestivum 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.

Named cultivars 1 recorded

Selections of Triticum aestivum that somebody named and propagated. A cultivar is not a botanical taxon: it is governed by the cultivated-plant code rather than the botanical one, so it appears in no taxonomic backbone, and it has no native range and no wild population of its own. These get no page here, because a cultivar has no photographs, no range and no flowering data of its own, and a page with none of those is not a page.

From Wikidata (CC0), joined to this species on its World Flora Online identifier, so the link to the parent is exact rather than a name match. This list is what is recorded in an openly licensed register; it is not every cultivar that exists, and for many genera it is not close. Why, and how far short it falls.

Also published as 308 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.

  • Aegilops straussii Hausskn.
  • Agropyron ichyostachyum (Seidl) P.Candargy
  • Frumentum triticum E.H.L.Krause
  • Secale creticum L.
  • Spelta vulgaris Ser.
  • Triticum aegyptiacum Mazzuc.
  • Triticum aestivum prol. compactum (Host) Thell.
  • Triticum aestivum subsp. hadropyrum (Flaksb.) Tzvelev
  • Triticum aestivum subsp. inflatum (Kudr.) Tzvelev
  • Triticum aestivum subsp. petropavlovskyi E.V.Zuev
  • Triticum aestivum subsp. tibetanum Q.Q.Shao
  • Triticum aestivum subsp. tibeticum J.Z.Shao
  • Triticum aestivum subsp. transcaucasicum Dorof. & Laptev
  • Triticum aestivum subsp. vavilovii (Jakubz.) Á.Löve
  • Triticum aestivum subsp. vulgare (Vill.) Thell.
  • Triticum aestivum subsp. yunnanense King ex S.L.Chen
  • Triticum aestivum var. albidum (Alef.) Valev
  • Triticum aestivum var. albinflatocapitatum Udachin
  • Triticum aestivum var. alborubrum Gray
  • Triticum aestivum var. album Gray
  • Triticum aestivum var. arnualru-claviformum Gandilyan
  • Triticum aestivum var. arnuruciru-claviformum Gandilyan
  • Triticum aestivum var. australianum Udachin & Schachm.
  • Triticum aestivum var. baladseetense K.Hammer & Filat.

and 284 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.