Clintonia borealis(Aiton) Raf.

bluebead lily

WFO wfo-0000763732 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Clintonia borealis, photographed by Tom Scavo
fig. a Tom Scavo, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-10 / obs. 205897327
Clintonia borealis, photographed by Pierre Cartier
fig. b Pierre Cartier, CC0 1.0 / obs. 205008333
Clintonia borealis, photographed by Steven Lamonde
fig. c Steven Lamonde, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 206017588
Clintonia borealis, photographed by Will Kuhn
fig. d Will Kuhn, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204610460
Clintonia borealis, photographed by Lynn Harper
fig. e Lynn Harper, CC0 1.0 / obs. 203985524
Clintonia borealis, photographed by Pierre Cartier
fig. f Pierre Cartier, CC0 1.0 / obs. 203195110
Clintonia borealis, photographed by Barry Cottam
fig. g Barry Cottam, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 202802609
Clintonia borealis, photographed by Tom Scavo
fig. h Tom Scavo, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204097409

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.

Confused withby our own model

These are not lookalikes we guessed at. Each one is a species our identification model genuinely mistook for this plant, and how many times. The error rate is published.

Flowering n = 4,992 observations

Peak flowering in Jun, from 4,992 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 27 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.

  • Clintonia aitonii Raf.
  • Clintonia angustifolia Raf.
  • Clintonia biflora Raf.
  • Clintonia biumbella Raf.
  • Clintonia borealis f. albicarpa Killip ex House
  • Clintonia borealis f. borealis
  • Clintonia borealis f. lateralis Peck
  • Clintonia ciliata Raf.
  • Clintonia falcata Raf.
  • Clintonia fulva Raf.
  • Clintonia glomerata Raf.
  • Clintonia latifolia Raf.
  • Clintonia multiflora Raf.
  • Clintonia mutans Raf.
  • Clintonia nutans Raf.
  • Clintonia nutans var. dasistema Raf.
  • Clintonia nutans var. fascicularis Raf.
  • Clintonia nutans var. macrostema Raf.
  • Clintonia nutans var. obovata Raf.
  • Clintonia nutans var. prolifera Raf.
  • Clintonia nutans var. uniflora Raf.
  • Clintonia ophioglossoides Raf.
  • Clintonia triflora Raf.
  • Clintonia undulata Raf.

and 3 more.

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.