Castilleja pallida(L.) Kunth

Fairbanks annual Indian paintbrush

WFO wfo-0000590407 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 5 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 5 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Castilleja pallida, photographed by Dmitry Kulakov
fig. a Dmitry Kulakov, CC BY 4.0 / 2013-08-02 / obs. 53235759

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.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium
The New York Botanical Garden
Accession
68139
Filed as
Castilleja pallida var. camporum (Howell) Greenm.
Det. by
J. M. Egger 2000-02-15
Collected
W. N. Suksdorf 1884-06
Origin
US
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 23 botanical countries

Regions where Castilleja pallida is native: Altay, Amur, Buryatiya, Chita, Inner Mongolia, Irkutsk, Kamchatka, Kazakhstan, Khabarovsk, Krasnoyarsk, Magadan, Manchuria, Mongolia, Primorye, Sakhalin, Tuva, West Siberia, Yakutiya, East European Russia, Alaska, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Yukon AltayAmurBuryatiyaChitaInner MongoliaIrkutskKamchatkaKazakhstanKhabarovskKrasnoyarskMagadanManchuriaMongoliaPrimoryeSakhalinTuvaWest SiberiaYakutiyaEast European RussiaAlaskaNorthwest TerritoriesNunavutYukon
Native distribution of Castilleja pallida, 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
Altay ALT ASIA-TEMPERATE
Amur AMU
Buryatiya BRY
Chita CTA
Inner Mongolia CHI
Irkutsk IRK
Kamchatka KAM
Kazakhstan KAZ
Khabarovsk KHA
Krasnoyarsk KRA
Magadan MAG
Manchuria CHM
Mongolia MON
Primorye PRM
Sakhalin SAK
Tuva TVA
West Siberia WSB
Yakutiya YAK
Alaska ASK NORTHERN AMERICA
Northwest Territories NWT
Nunavut NUN
Yukon YUK
East European Russia RUE EUROPE

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 40 in flower of 42 examined

Proportion of examined Castilleja pallida in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 0 too few examined
Feb 0 0 too few examined
Mar 0 0 too few examined
Apr 0 0 too few examined
May 0 0 too few examined
Jun 12 13 92% 67% to 99%
Jul 22 23 96% 79% to 99%
Aug 5 5 100% 57% to 100%
Sep 1 1 too few examined
Oct 0 0 too few examined
Nov 0 0 too few examined
Dec 0 0 too few examined

Peak flowering in Aug. Each bar is the share of Castilleja pallida 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. 40 of 42 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 9 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 338 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -30.4 °C -20.5 °C -16.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 11.6 °C 15.8 °C 23.3 °C
Annual rainfall 350 mm 692 mm 2,327 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 16 mm 87 mm 391 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 338 research-grade observations of Castilleja pallida 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 23 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.

  • Bartsia acuminata Pursh
  • Bartsia pallida L.
  • Bartsia rubricoma Pall.
  • Bartsia sibirica Pall.
  • Castilleja acuminata (Pursh) Spreng.
  • Castilleja acuminata Turcz.
  • Castilleja annua Pennell
  • Castilleja caudata (Pennell) Rebrist.
  • Castilleja caudata var. auricoma (Pennell) Hultén
  • Castilleja muelleri Pennell
  • Castilleja pallida f. tincta Cockerell
  • Castilleja pallida subsp. auricoma Pennell
  • Castilleja pallida subsp. caudata Pennell
  • Castilleja pallida subsp. typica Pennell
  • Castilleja pallida var. acuminata (Pursh) MacMill.
  • Castilleja pallida var. alpina Porter
  • Castilleja pallida var. auricoma (Pennell) B.Boivin
  • Castilleja pallida var. communis Regel & Tiling
  • Castilleja pallida var. linifolia Regel & Tiling
  • Castilleja sibirica Lindl.
  • Castilleja yukonis Pennell
  • Rhinanthus acuminatus Poir.
  • Rhinanthus pallidus (L.) Lam.

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. USDA PLANTS Database. common name, checklist symbol CAAN8. public domain. 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.