Castilleja purpurea(Nutt.) G.Don

Purple paintbrush

WFO wfo-0000590491 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Castilleja purpurea, photographed by saltyhiker
fig. a saltyhiker, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-04-30 / obs. 192581456
Castilleja purpurea, photographed by Roz Hunter
fig. b Roz Hunter, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 123260913
Castilleja purpurea, photographed by Reid Hardin
fig. c Reid Hardin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 121725668
Castilleja purpurea, photographed by kayler09
fig. d kayler09, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 122528692
Castilleja purpurea, photographed by saltyhiker
fig. e saltyhiker, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 117897674
Castilleja purpurea, photographed by Roz Hunter
fig. f Roz Hunter, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 121341055
Castilleja purpurea, photographed by saltyhiker
fig. g saltyhiker, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 116560832
Castilleja purpurea, photographed by Roz Hunter
fig. h Roz Hunter, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 121341110

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 = 114 observations

Peak flowering in Apr, from 114 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 4 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.

  • Castilleja purpurea f. corallina Waterf.
  • Castilleja purpurea var. purpurea
  • Castilleja williamsii Pennell
  • Euchroma purpurea Nutt.

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.