Fendlera rupicola (Cliff Fendler Bush)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Fendlera rupicola, photographed by Eric Knight — fig. a Eric Knight, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-04 / obs. 203859277

Fendlera rupicola, photographed by Sean Krieg — fig. c Sean Krieg, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 199117157

Fendlera rupicola, photographed by Steve Woodward — fig. d Steve Woodward, CC0 1.0 / obs. 200334166

Fendlera rupicola, photographed by Michael Bunsen — fig. e Michael Bunsen, CC0 1.0 / obs. 198292088

Fendlera rupicola, photographed by Alexandre Passos — fig. f Alexandre Passos, CC0 1.0 / obs. 185763775

Fendlera rupicola, photographed by Robbie Hannawacker — fig. g Robbie Hannawacker, CC0 1.0 / obs. 185901827

Fendlera rupicola, photographed by Bobby McCabe — fig. h Bobby McCabe, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 152526349

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 8 botanical countries

Native distribution of Fendlera rupicola, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Arizona	ARI	NORTHERN AMERICA
Colorado	COL
Mexico Northeast	MXE
Mexico Northwest	MXN
Nevada	NEV
New Mexico	NWM
Texas	TEX
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 116 in flower of 143 examined

83%

87%

98%

79%

71%

25%

67%

Proportion of examined Fendlera rupicola in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	0	too few examined
Feb	0	1	too few examined
Mar	5	6	83%	44% to 97%
Apr	39	45	87%	74% to 94%
May	44	45	98%	88% to 100%
Jun	11	14	79%	52% to 92%
Jul	5	7	71%	36% to 92%
Aug	2	8	25%	7% to 59%
Sep	6	9	67%	35% to 88%
Oct	1	3	too few examined
Nov	0	2	too few examined
Dec	3	3	too few examined

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Fendlera rupicola 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. 116 of 143 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 5 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 1,243 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-12.4 °C	-6.2 °C	1.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	25.8 °C	29.0 °C	33.8 °C
Annual rainfall	257 mm	407 mm	580 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	31 mm	57 mm	83 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 1,243 research-grade observations of Fendlera rupicola 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 8 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.

Edwinia wrightii (Engelm. & A.Gray) A.Heller
Fendlera falcata Thornber
Fendlera rupicola var. falcata (Thornber) Rehder
Fendlera rupicola var. lindheimeri A.Gray
Fendlera rupicola var. tomentella (Thornber ex Wooton & Standl.) Kearney & Peebles
Fendlera rupicola var. wrightii Engelm. & A.Gray
Fendlera tomentella Thornber ex Wooton & Standl.
Fendlera wrightii (Engelm. & A.Gray) A.Heller

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.