Carphephorus odoratissimus (vanillaleaf)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Carphephorus odoratissimus, photographed by Alan Weakley — fig. a Alan Weakley, CC0 1.0 / 2022-06-07 / obs. 204235593

Carphephorus odoratissimus, photographed by Kim — fig. b Kim, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 187600317

Carphephorus odoratissimus, photographed by Brian Finzel — fig. c Brian Finzel, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 127678635

Carphephorus odoratissimus, photographed by Dwight Kingsbury — fig. d Dwight Kingsbury, CC0 1.0 / obs. 101755273

Carphephorus odoratissimus, photographed by Lauren McLaurin — fig. e Lauren McLaurin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 100386640

Carphephorus odoratissimus, photographed by Jessica — fig. g Jessica, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 99576283

Carphephorus odoratissimus, photographed by novvictan — fig. h novvictan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 97026166

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 7 botanical countries

Native distribution of Carphephorus odoratissimus, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Alabama	ALA	NORTHERN AMERICA
Florida	FLA
Georgia	GEO
Louisiana	LOU
Mississippi	MSI
North Carolina	NCA
South Carolina	SCA

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 211 in flower of 309 examined

38%

13%

17%

38%

81%

90%

94%

74%

77%

Proportion of examined Carphephorus odoratissimus in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	5	13	38%	18% to 64%
Feb	1	1	too few examined
Mar	0	5	0%	0% to 43%
Apr	1	8	13%	2% to 47%
May	1	17	6%	1% to 27%
Jun	4	24	17%	7% to 36%
Jul	8	21	38%	21% to 59%
Aug	25	31	81%	64% to 91%
Sep	61	68	90%	80% to 95%
Oct	72	77	94%	86% to 97%
Nov	23	31	74%	57% to 86%
Dec	10	13	77%	50% to 92%

Peak flowering in Oct. Each bar is the share of Carphephorus odoratissimus 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. 211 of 309 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. One month has fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for it. 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 2,005 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	5.2 °C	8.9 °C	12.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	29.1 °C	31.7 °C	32.4 °C
Annual rainfall	1,280 mm	1,423 mm	1,772 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	181 mm	238 mm	359 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 2,005 research-grade observations of Carphephorus odoratissimus 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 9 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.

Anonymos odoratissima Walter
Chrysocoma odoratissima J.F.Gmel.
Chrysocoma odoratissima Raeusch.
Eupatorium glastifolium Bertol.
Liatris amplexicaulis Raf.
Liatris odoratissima (J.F.Gmel.) Michx.
Liatris odoratissima (J.F.Gmel.) Willd.
Serratula odoratissima (J.F.Gmel.) Dum.Cours.
Trilisa odoratissima (J.F.Gmel.) Cass.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.