When does salal bloom in Oregon?

Most often in May. Across 502 dated, research-grade observations of Gaultheria shallon in Oregon, the flowering season runs roughly May to June.

Peak May In flower 502 Examined 1,285 State Oregon

Flowering 502 in flower of 1,285 examined

12%

15%

17%

34%

75%

74%

42%

12%

22%

19%

Proportion of examined Gaultheria shallon in Oregon in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	8	67	12%	6% to 22%
Feb	10	65	15%	9% to 26%
Mar	19	112	17%	11% to 25%
Apr	37	109	34%	26% to 43%
May	183	243	75%	70% to 80%
Jun	139	189	74%	67% to 79%
Jul	64	152	42%	35% to 50%
Aug	9	121	7%	4% to 14%
Sep	3	51	6%	2% to 16%
Oct	9	76	12%	6% to 21%
Nov	15	69	22%	14% to 33%
Dec	6	31	19%	9% to 36%

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Gaultheria shallon in Oregon 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. 502 of 1,285 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 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.wt38fd.

What this is, and what it is not

This is a record of when people in Oregon found Gaultheria shallon in flower, not a forecast. It is computed only from observations made in Oregon, so it is not the species’ global average dragged onto a map: the same plant flowers on different dates in different places, and that is the entire point of the page.

It will not tell you what your particular plant will do this year. Bloom time moves with the season, with altitude, and with the weather, and a warm February pulls everything forward. We publish the distribution and the sample size, and we refuse to draw a month that too few people examined.

The plant

Gaultheria shallon

salal

Sourcesevery claim on this page

GBIF (iNaturalist Research-grade Observations). Dated flowering annotations in Oregon. Every record achieved iNaturalist quality grade Research, which is applied upstream at export. 10.15468/dl.wt38fd. Retrieved 2026-07-14.
World Flora Online Plant List. The accepted name. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.