Helichrysum foetidum(L.) Cass.

stinking strawflower

WFO wfo-0000009210 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Helichrysum foetidum, photographed by Di Turner
fig. a Di Turner, CC0 1.0 / 2022-05-01 / obs. 194983343

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
190389
Filed as
Helichrysum foetidum (L.) Cass.
Det. by
C. T. Imada 1997-01-01
Collected
C. R. Annable 1997-06-12
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.

Flowering 184 in flower of 220 examined

Proportion of examined Helichrysum foetidum in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 7 7 100% 65% to 100%
Feb 17 18 94% 74% to 99%
Mar 31 32 97% 84% to 99%
Apr 32 35 91% 78% to 97%
May 13 15 87% 62% to 96%
Jun 14 16 88% 64% to 97%
Jul 14 19 74% 51% to 88%
Aug 3 7 43% 16% to 75%
Sep 5 9 56% 27% to 81%
Oct 16 24 67% 47% to 82%
Nov 15 17 88% 66% to 97%
Dec 17 21 81% 60% to 92%

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Helichrysum foetidum 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. 184 of 220 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 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 1,199 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 4.8 °C 10.0 °C 12.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 20.0 °C 23.0 °C 26.7 °C
Annual rainfall 591 mm 949 mm 2,433 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 80 mm 125 mm 191 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,199 research-grade observations of Helichrysum foetidum 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.

  • Helichrysum foetidum var. intermedia Chiov.
  • Helichrysum foetidum var. microcephalum A.Rich.
  • Helichrysum foetidum var. molle Moeser
  • Helichrysum foetidum var. pallidum Less.
  • Helichrysum glutinosum A.Braun
  • Helichrysum gregorii S.Moore
  • Helichrysum uviranum De Wild.
  • Helichrysum zairense Lisowski

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.