Lepechinia caulescens(Ortega) Epling

WFO wfo-0000226021 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 6 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 6 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Lepechinia caulescens, photographed by Alan Rockefeller
fig. a Alan Rockefeller, CC BY 4.0 / 2019-08-29 / obs. 50263242

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 6 botanical countries

Regions where Lepechinia caulescens is native: Mexico Central, Mexico Gulf, Mexico Northeast, Mexico Northwest, Mexico Southwest, Guatemala Mexico CentralMexico GulfMexico NortheastMexico NorthwestMexico SouthwestGuatemala
Native distribution of Lepechinia caulescens, 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
Mexico Central MXC NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Gulf MXG
Mexico Northeast MXE
Mexico Northwest MXN
Mexico Southwest MXS
Guatemala GUA SOUTHERN AMERICA

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 145 in flower of 303 examined

Proportion of examined Lepechinia caulescens in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 5 0% 0% to 43%
Feb 1 6 17% 3% to 56%
Mar 0 6 0% 0% to 39%
Apr 0 13 0% 0% to 23%
May 2 6 33% 10% to 70%
Jun 0 2 too few examined
Jul 29 42 69% 54% to 81%
Aug 57 62 92% 82% to 97%
Sep 35 64 55% 43% to 66%
Oct 17 71 24% 16% to 35%
Nov 3 21 14% 5% to 35%
Dec 1 5 20% 4% to 62%

Peak flowering in Aug. Each bar is the share of Lepechinia caulescens 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. 145 of 303 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. One month has fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for it. 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 405 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 0.2 °C 3.7 °C 7.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 19.7 °C 22.8 °C 27.1 °C
Annual rainfall 650 mm 1,144 mm 1,720 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 27 mm 42 mm 71 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 405 research-grade observations of Lepechinia caulescens 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 3 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.

  • Horminum caulescens Ortega
  • Lepechinia spicata Willd.
  • Ulricia pyramidata Jacq. ex Steud.

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. 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.