Castilleja lanataA.Gray

Sierra woolly Indian paintbrush

WFO wfo-0000590288 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Castilleja lanata, photographed by Andrew Tree
fig. a Andrew Tree, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-05 / obs. 203586553

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 5 botanical countries

Regions where Castilleja lanata is native: Arizona, Mexico Northeast, Mexico Northwest, New Mexico, Texas ArizonaMexico NortheastMexico NorthwestNew MexicoTexas
Native distribution of Castilleja lanata, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Arizona ARI NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Northeast MXE
Mexico Northwest MXN
New Mexico NWM
Texas TEX

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 127 in flower of 132 examined

Proportion of examined Castilleja lanata in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 1 2 too few examined
Feb 10 10 100% 72% to 100%
Mar 14 14 100% 78% to 100%
Apr 23 24 96% 80% to 99%
May 10 10 100% 72% to 100%
Jun 12 13 92% 67% to 99%
Jul 16 16 100% 81% to 100%
Aug 9 10 90% 60% to 98%
Sep 11 12 92% 65% to 99%
Oct 12 12 100% 76% to 100%
Nov 7 7 100% 65% to 100%
Dec 2 2 too few examined

Peak flowering in Feb. Each bar is the share of Castilleja lanata 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. 127 of 132 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 2 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 315 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -3.1 °C 3.4 °C 7.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 25.4 °C 30.7 °C 35.8 °C
Annual rainfall 284 mm 416 mm 603 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 15 mm 42 mm 66 mm

It is found where winters bring light frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 315 research-grade observations of Castilleja lanata 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.

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. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. 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.