Calochortus venustusDouglas ex Benth.

Butterfly Mariposa Lily

WFO wfo-0000762832 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Calochortus venustus, photographed by George Williams
fig. a George Williams, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-07 / obs. 204285650
Calochortus venustus, photographed by George Williams
fig. b George Williams, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204726459
Calochortus venustus, photographed by Amthinkia
fig. c Amthinkia, CC0 1.0 / obs. 200429932
Calochortus venustus, photographed by Amthinkia
fig. d Amthinkia, CC0 1.0 / obs. 200429873
Calochortus venustus, photographed by George Williams
fig. e George Williams, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 199899831
Calochortus venustus, photographed by Dario Taraborelli
fig. f Dario Taraborelli, CC0 1.0 / obs. 199547954
Calochortus venustus, photographed by George Williams
fig. g George Williams, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 198008554
Calochortus venustus, photographed by Trevor Van Loon
fig. h Trevor Van Loon, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 198603322

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.

Flowering n = 2,986 observations

Peak flowering in May, from 2,986 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 12 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.

  • Calochortus venustus unranked pictus Wallace
  • Calochortus venustus var. caroli Cockerell
  • Calochortus venustus var. eldorado Purdy
  • Calochortus venustus var. oculatus Tubergen
  • Calochortus venustus var. pictus (Wallace) Purdy & L.H.Bailey
  • Calochortus venustus var. purpurascens S.Watson
  • Calochortus venustus var. purpureus Baker
  • Calochortus venustus var. roseus Reuthe
  • Calochortus venustus var. sanguineus Purdy & L.H.Bailey
  • Calochortus venustus var. sulphureus Purdy
  • Calochortus venustus var. superbus L.H.Bailey & E.Z.Bailey
  • Mariposa venusta (Douglas ex Benth.) Hoover

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.