Cistanthe picta(Gillies ex Arn.) Carolin ex Hershk.

WFO wfo-0000607161 Accepted WFO 2026-06 4 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–d · 2 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 2 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.

Cistanthe picta, photographed by Agustín Zarco
fig. a Agustín Zarco, CC BY 4.0 / 2020-03-07 / obs. 65193908

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 3 botanical countries

Regions where Cistanthe picta is native: Argentina Northwest, Chile Central, Chile North Argentina NorthwestChile CentralChile North
Native distribution of Cistanthe picta, 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
Argentina Northwest AGW SOUTHERN AMERICA
Chile Central CLC
Chile North CLN

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 43 in flower of 49 examined

Proportion of examined Cistanthe picta in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 17 20 85% 64% to 95%
Feb 5 5 100% 57% to 100%
Mar 1 1 too few examined
Apr 0 0 too few examined
May 0 0 too few examined
Jun 0 0 too few examined
Jul 0 0 too few examined
Aug 0 0 too few examined
Sep 0 0 too few examined
Oct 0 1 too few examined
Nov 6 6 100% 61% to 100%
Dec 14 16 88% 64% to 97%

Peak flowering in Feb. Each bar is the share of Cistanthe picta 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. 43 of 49 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 8 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.

Also published as 14 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.

  • Calandrinia frigida Barnéoud
  • Calandrinia macrocalyx Hauman
  • Calandrinia oblongifolia Barnéoud
  • Calandrinia picta Gillies ex Arn.
  • Calandrinia picta var. frigida (Barnéoud) Reiche
  • Calandrinia picta var. portulacifolia (Phil.) Hicken
  • Calandrinia portulacifolia Phil.
  • Cistanthe frigida (Barnéoud) Carolin ex Hershkovitz
  • Cistanthe frigida (Barnéoud) Peralta
  • Cistanthe macrocalyx (Hauman) Carolin ex Hershk.
  • Cistanthe oblongifolia (Barnéoud) D.I.Ford
  • Cistanthe picta (Gill. ex Arn.) Carolin ex Hershkovitz
  • Claytonia frigida (Barnéoud) Kuntze
  • Claytonia oblongifolia (Barnéoud) Kuntze

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. 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.