Phormium tenaxJ.R.Forst. & G.Forst.

New Zealand flax

WFO wfo-0000717490 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Phormium tenax, photographed by Joe Dillon
fig. a Joe Dillon, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-05 / obs. 203786500

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.

Confused withby our own model

These are not lookalikes we guessed at. Each one is a species our identification model genuinely mistook for this plant, and how many times. The error rate is published.

Flowering n = 415 observations

Flowering observations of Phormium tenax by month
MonthObservations
Jan50
Feb7
Mar2
Apr1
May6
Jun13
Jul8
Aug4
Sep9
Oct76
Nov140
Dec99

Peak flowering in Nov, from 415 community-annotated observations worldwide. This is a global aggregate, not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres, and citizen-science records cluster near cities, at weekends, and in spring. Where a species has fewer than 30 annotated records we do not draw this chart at all.

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.

  • Chlamydia tenacissima Gaertn.
  • Lachenalia ramosa Lam.
  • Phormium ramosum (Lam.) Billb.
  • Phormium tenax f. atropurpureum Voss

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.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice, no toxicity claim and no native range, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.