Cardamine polemonioidesRouy

WFO wfo-0000587346 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Cardamine polemonioides, photographed by Syd Cannings
fig. a Syd Cannings, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-06-13 / obs. 136678943
Cardamine polemonioides, photographed by naokitakebayashi
fig. b naokitakebayashi, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 84237346
Cardamine polemonioides, photographed by Rose Zappa
fig. c Rose Zappa, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 23197529
Cardamine polemonioides, photographed by rappman
fig. d rappman, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 8170539
Cardamine polemonioides, photographed by CatherineK
fig. e CatherineK, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 17258132
Cardamine polemonioides, photographed by Brian Gratwicke
fig. f Brian Gratwicke, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 437797
Cardamine polemonioides, photographed by Tuoichen
fig. g Tuoichen, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 155984130
Cardamine polemonioides, photographed by Eric Lamb
fig. h Eric Lamb, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 160358438

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.

Native range 22 botanical countries

Regions where Cardamine polemonioides is native: Kamchatka, Krasnoyarsk, West Siberia, Yakutiya, Finland, Føroyar, Iceland, North European Russia, Northwest European Russia, Norway, Svalbard, Sweden, Alaska, Aleutian Is., Greenland, Labrador, Manitoba, Newfoundland, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Québec, Yukon KamchatkaKrasnoyarskWest SiberiaYakutiyaFinlandIcelandNorth European RussiaNorthwest European RussiaNorwaySvalbardSwedenAlaskaGreenlandLabradorManitobaNewfoundlandNorthwest TerritoriesNunavutQuébecYukon Føroyar
Native distribution of Cardamine polemonioides, 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. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Alaska ASK NORTHERN AMERICA
Aleutian Is. ALU
Greenland GNL
Labrador LAB
Manitoba MAN
Newfoundland NFL
Northwest Territories NWT
Nunavut NUN
Québec QUE
Yukon YUK
Finland FIN EUROPE
Føroyar FOR
Iceland ICE
North European Russia RUN
Northwest European Russia RUW
Norway NOR
Svalbard SVA
Sweden SWE
Kamchatka KAM ASIA-TEMPERATE
Krasnoyarsk KRA
West Siberia WSB
Yakutiya YAK

Not drawn on the map: Aleutian Is.. We hold no public-domain boundary for this region, so it is listed rather than guessed at.

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 55 in flower of 57 examined

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Cardamine polemonioides 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. 55 of 57 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 8 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. 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 464 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -28.9 °C -7.1 °C -1.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 3.9 °C 12.4 °C 18.2 °C
Annual rainfall 353 mm 1,210 mm 2,288 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 41 mm 197 mm 432 mm

It is found where winters are arctic. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 464 research-grade observations of Cardamine polemonioides 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.

Also published as 3 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.

  • Cardamine nymanii Gand.
  • Cardamine pratensis subsp. angustifolia (Hook.) O.E.Schulz
  • Cardamine pratensis var. angustifolia Hook.

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. 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.