Ericameria discoidea(Nutt.) G.L.Nesom

whitestem goldenbush

WFO wfo-0000117920 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Ericameria discoidea, photographed by Andrew Lie
fig. a Andrew Lie, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-09-03 / obs. 157089477

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
Smithsonian, US National Herbarium
Accession
US 275630
Filed as
Ericameria discoidea (Nutt.) G.L.Nesom
Det. by
Urbatsch, Lowell E., Curator (LSU), Louisiana State University (UNITED STATES)
Collected
F. V. Coville & J. B. Leiberg 1896-08-07
Origin
US
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC0 1.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. We link to the digitised sheet rather than rehosting it, because the holding institutions do not serve their images to third parties reliably and we are not going to show you a picture we cannot actually deliver. 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 sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 7 botanical countries

Regions where Ericameria discoidea is native: California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah CaliforniaColoradoIdahoMontanaNevadaOregonUtah
Native distribution of Ericameria discoidea, 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
California CAL NORTHERN AMERICA
Colorado COL
Idaho IDA
Montana MNT
Nevada NEV
Oregon ORE
Utah UTA

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 31 in flower of 36 examined

Proportion of examined Ericameria discoidea in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 0 too few examined
Feb 0 0 too few examined
Mar 0 0 too few examined
Apr 0 0 too few examined
May 0 0 too few examined
Jun 0 0 too few examined
Jul 12 14 86% 60% to 96%
Aug 14 15 93% 70% to 99%
Sep 5 6 83% 44% to 97%
Oct 0 1 too few examined
Nov 0 0 too few examined
Dec 0 0 too few examined

Peak flowering in Aug. Each bar is the share of Ericameria discoidea 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. 31 of 36 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 9 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 341 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -19.3 °C -14.9 °C -11.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 17.8 °C 20.5 °C 24.1 °C
Annual rainfall 460 mm 876 mm 1,534 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 55 mm 102 mm 173 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 341 research-grade observations of Ericameria discoidea 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 7 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.

  • Aster macronema Kuntze
  • Bigelowia macronema M.E.Jones
  • Haplopappus macronema A.Gray
  • Haplopappus macronema subsp. macronema
  • Haplopappus macronema var. macronema
  • Haplopappus macronema var. typicus H.M.Hall
  • Macronema discoidea 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.
  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.