Gentiana glaucaPall.

pale gentian

WFO wfo-0000697590 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Gentiana glauca, photographed by J Straka
fig. a J Straka, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-08-02 / obs. 172005735
Gentiana glauca, photographed by J Straka
fig. b J Straka, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 171194732
Gentiana glauca, photographed by J Straka
fig. c J Straka, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 171194358
Gentiana glauca, photographed by J Straka
fig. d J Straka, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 151502598
Gentiana glauca, photographed by J Straka
fig. e J Straka, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 151503357
Gentiana glauca, photographed by J Straka
fig. f J Straka, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 149959643
Gentiana glauca, photographed by J Straka
fig. g J Straka, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 149748665
Gentiana glauca, photographed by Syd Cannings
fig. h Syd Cannings, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 144822751

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 16 botanical countries

Regions where Gentiana glauca is native: Amur, Chita, Japan, Kamchatka, Khabarovsk, Kuril Is., Magadan, Sakhalin, Yakutiya, Alaska, Alberta, British Columbia, Montana, Northwest Territories, Washington, Yukon AmurChitaJapanKamchatkaKhabarovskMagadanSakhalinYakutiyaAlaskaAlbertaBritish ColumbiaMontanaNorthwest TerritoriesWashingtonYukon
Native distribution of Gentiana glauca, 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
Amur AMU ASIA-TEMPERATE
Chita CTA
Japan JAP
Kamchatka KAM
Khabarovsk KHA
Kuril Is. KUR
Magadan MAG
Sakhalin SAK
Yakutiya YAK
Alaska ASK NORTHERN AMERICA
Alberta ABT
British Columbia BRC
Montana MNT
Northwest Territories NWT
Washington WAS
Yukon YUK

Not drawn on the map: Kuril Is.. We hold no public-domain boundary for this region, so it is listed rather than guessed at.

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 76 in flower of 91 examined

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Gentiana glauca 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. 76 of 91 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 839 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -27.7 °C -18.7 °C -12.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 10.8 °C 13.7 °C 16.3 °C
Annual rainfall 511 mm 1,000 mm 2,015 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 52 mm 131 mm 319 mm

It is found where winters are arctic. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 839 research-grade observations of Gentiana glauca 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 11 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.

  • Ciminalis glauca Bercht. & J.Presl
  • Coilantha glauca G.Don
  • Dasistepha caespitosa (Graham) Raf.
  • Dasystephana glauca (Pall.) Borkh.
  • Dasystephana glauca Rydb.
  • Gentiana caespitosa Graham
  • Gentiana glauca f. chlorantha Jordal
  • Gentiana glauca f. glauca
  • Gentiana glauca var. paulensis Kellogg
  • Gentianodes glauca (Pall.) Á.Löve & D.Löve
  • Pneumonanthe glauca (Pall.) F.W.Schmidt

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.