Calycanthus occidentalisHook. & Arn.

California sweetshrub

WFO wfo-0000581824 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Calycanthus occidentalis, photographed by Nicholas Wei
fig. a Nicholas Wei, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-05-22 / obs. 199913384

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 = 309 observations

Flowering observations of Calycanthus occidentalis by month
MonthObservations
Jan0
Feb1
Mar0
Apr19
May106
Jun118
Jul52
Aug9
Sep4
Oct0
Nov0
Dec0

Peak flowering in Jun, from 309 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 2 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.

  • Butneria occidentalis (Hook. & Arn.) Greene
  • Calycanthus macrophyllus K.Koch

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.