Hieracium tristeWilld. ex Spreng.

woolly hawkweed

WFO wfo-0000038030 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Hieracium triste, photographed by Randal
fig. a Randal, CC0 1.0 / 2020-07-12 / obs. 84172763

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
2913945
Filed as
Hieracium triste Willd. ex Spreng.
Det. by
not recorded on this sheet
Collected
not recorded
Origin
not recorded
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.

Native range 16 botanical countries

Regions where Hieracium triste is native: Kamchatka, Kuril Is., Alaska, Alberta, British Columbia, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Northwest Territories, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming, Yukon KamchatkaAlaskaAlbertaBritish ColumbiaCaliforniaColoradoIdahoMontanaNew MexicoNorthwest TerritoriesOregonUtahWashingtonWyomingYukon
Native distribution of Hieracium triste, 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
Alaska ASK NORTHERN AMERICA
Alberta ABT
British Columbia BRC
California CAL
Colorado COL
Idaho IDA
Montana MNT
New Mexico NWM
Northwest Territories NWT
Oregon ORE
Utah UTA
Washington WAS
Wyoming WYO
Yukon YUK
Kamchatka KAM ASIA-TEMPERATE
Kuril Is. KUR

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 35 in flower of 38 examined

Proportion of examined Hieracium triste 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 3 3 too few examined
Jul 18 19 95% 75% to 99%
Aug 14 16 88% 64% to 97%
Sep 0 0 too few examined
Oct 0 0 too few examined
Nov 0 0 too few examined
Dec 0 0 too few examined

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Hieracium triste 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. 35 of 38 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 10 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 498 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -21.0 °C -12.8 °C -3.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 12.0 °C 15.7 °C 20.5 °C
Annual rainfall 798 mm 1,671 mm 4,552 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 98 mm 223 mm 602 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 498 research-grade observations of Hieracium triste 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 19 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.

  • Chlorocrepis tristis (Willd. ex Spreng.) Á.Löve & D.Löve
  • Chlorocrepis tristis subsp. gracilis (Hook.) W.A.Weber
  • Chlorocrepis tristis subsp. tristis
  • Hieracium arcticum Froel.
  • Hieracium gracile Hook.
  • Hieracium gracile subvar. densifloccum Zahn
  • Hieracium gracile var. alaskanum Zahn
  • Hieracium gracile var. densifloccum (Zahn) Cronquist
  • Hieracium gracile var. detonsum (A.Gray) A.Gray
  • Hieracium gracile var. gracile
  • Hieracium gracile var. yukonense A.E.Porsild
  • Hieracium triste subsp. gracile (Hook.) Calder & Roy L.Taylor
  • Hieracium triste subsp. triste
  • Hieracium triste var. detonsum A.Gray
  • Hieracium triste var. fulvum Hultén
  • Hieracium triste var. gracile (Hook.) A.Gray
  • Hieracium triste var. triste
  • Hieracium triste var. tristiforme Zahn
  • Stenotheca tristis (Willd. ex Spreng.) Schljakov

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.