Cassiope mertensiana(Bong.) G.Don

western moss-heather

WFO wfo-0000589563 Accepted WFO 2026-06 6 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–f

Cassiope mertensiana, photographed by Diego Blanco
fig. a Diego Blanco, CC0 1.0 / 2021-08-13 / obs. 156175065
Cassiope mertensiana, photographed by John Brew
fig. b John Brew, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 152814268
Cassiope mertensiana, photographed by lchaney
fig. c lchaney, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 149408212
Cassiope mertensiana, photographed by J Straka
fig. d J Straka, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 171196371
Cassiope mertensiana, photographed by J Straka
fig. e J Straka, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 172005566
Cassiope mertensiana, photographed by J Straka
fig. f J Straka, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 171196250

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 = 520 observations

Peak flowering in Jul, from 520 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 8 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.

  • Andromeda cupressina Hook.
  • Andromeda mertensiana Bong.
  • Cassiope mertensiana subsp. californica Piper
  • Cassiope mertensiana subsp. ciliolata Piper
  • Cassiope mertensiana subsp. gracilis Piper
  • Cassiope mertensiana subsp. mertensiana
  • Cassiope mertensiana var. californica (Piper) Tiehm
  • Cassiope mertensiana var. gracilis (Piper) C.L.Hitchc.

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.