Draba californica(Jeps.) Rollins & R.A.Price

California draba

WFO wfo-0000655093 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 4 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 4 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.

Draba californica, photographed by Jim Morefield
fig. a Jim Morefield, CC BY 4.0 / 2015-07-29 / obs. 13500661
Draba californica, photographed by Steve Matson
fig. b Steve Matson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 87927056
Draba californica, photographed by Steve Matson
fig. c Steve Matson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 87926980
Draba californica, photographed by Steve Matson
fig. d Steve Matson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 87927022
Draba californica, photographed by Steve Matson
fig. e Steve Matson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 98115256
Draba californica, photographed by Steve Matson
fig. f Steve Matson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 98115288
Draba californica, photographed by Steve Matson
fig. g Steve Matson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 98115214
Draba californica, photographed by Steve Matson
fig. h Steve Matson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 98115575

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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 33 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -18.8 °C -17.7 °C -14.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 18.3 °C 19.1 °C 22.0 °C
Annual rainfall 503 mm 529 mm 536 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 81 mm 86 mm 89 mm

It is found where winters are severely cold. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 33 research-grade observations of Draba californica 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.

Also published as 1 synonym

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.

  • Draba cuneifolia var. californica Jeps.

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.

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. It has no native range either: Kew's checklist does not cover this taxon.