Dicentra eximia(Ker Gawl.) Torr.

Wild Bleeding Heartturkey corn

WFO wfo-0000644964 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Dicentra eximia, photographed by Clay Gibbons
fig. a Clay Gibbons, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-28 / obs. 201760813

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
40447
Filed as
Dicentra eximia (Ker Gawl.) Torr.
Det. by
H. T. Beck 1993-01-01
Collected
H. T. Beck 1990-10-07
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 9 botanical countries

Regions where Dicentra eximia is native: Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia KentuckyMarylandNew JerseyNew YorkNorth CarolinaPennsylvaniaTennesseeVirginiaWest Virginia
Native distribution of Dicentra eximia, 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
Kentucky KTY NORTHERN AMERICA
Maryland MRY
New Jersey NWJ
New York NWY
North Carolina NCA
Pennsylvania PEN
Tennessee TEN
Virginia VRG
West Virginia WVA

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 255 in flower of 263 examined

Proportion of examined Dicentra eximia in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 0 too few examined
Feb 0 0 too few examined
Mar 18 18 100% 82% to 100%
Apr 84 90 93% 86% to 97%
May 66 67 99% 92% to 100%
Jun 44 44 100% 92% to 100%
Jul 18 19 95% 75% to 99%
Aug 11 11 100% 74% to 100%
Sep 5 5 100% 57% to 100%
Oct 8 8 100% 68% to 100%
Nov 1 1 too few examined
Dec 0 0 too few examined

Peak flowering in Mar. Each bar is the share of Dicentra eximia 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. 255 of 263 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 4 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 1,129 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -9.8 °C -4.4 °C -0.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 21.9 °C 27.4 °C 30.3 °C
Annual rainfall 948 mm 1,260 mm 1,631 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 190 mm 264 mm 333 mm

It is found where winters bring hard 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 1,129 research-grade observations of Dicentra eximia 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 10 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.

  • Bicuculla eximia (Ker Gawl.) Millsp.
  • Bikukulla eximia (Ker Gawl.) Druce
  • Capnorchis eximia (Ker Gawl.) Planch.
  • Capnorchis eximia (Ker Gawl.) Kuntze
  • Corydalis eximia (Ker Gawl.) Link
  • Diclytra eximia (Ker Gawl.) DC.
  • Dielytra eximia (Ker Gawl.) G.Don
  • Eucapnos eximius (Ker Gawl.) Bernh.
  • Fumaria eximia Ker Gawl.
  • Fumaria formosa Poir.

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.