Loeselia coeruleaG.Don

WFO wfo-0001099988 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Loeselia coerulea, photographed by Leticia Jiménez Hernández
fig. a Leticia Jiménez Hernández, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2021-11-21 / obs. 169953796

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 7 botanical countries

Regions where Loeselia coerulea is native: Mexico Central, Mexico Gulf, Mexico Northeast, Mexico Southeast, Mexico Southwest, Guatemala, Honduras Mexico CentralMexico GulfMexico NortheastMexico SoutheastMexico SouthwestGuatemalaHonduras
Native distribution of Loeselia coerulea, 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 Southeast MXT
Mexico Southwest MXS
Guatemala GUA SOUTHERN AMERICA
Honduras HON

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 228 in flower of 258 examined

Proportion of examined Loeselia coerulea in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 30 32 94% 80% to 98%
Feb 15 18 83% 61% to 94%
Mar 11 13 85% 58% to 96%
Apr 14 15 93% 70% to 99%
May 4 5 80% 38% to 96%
Jun 7 7 100% 65% to 100%
Jul 4 6 67% 30% to 90%
Aug 13 19 68% 46% to 85%
Sep 11 13 85% 58% to 96%
Oct 40 45 89% 77% to 95%
Nov 46 49 94% 83% to 98%
Dec 33 36 92% 78% to 97%

Peak flowering in Jun. Each bar is the share of Loeselia coerulea 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. 228 of 258 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 286 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 3.1 °C 5.6 °C 10.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 21.9 °C 25.7 °C 29.8 °C
Annual rainfall 406 mm 589 mm 862 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 18 mm 29 mm 52 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 286 research-grade observations of Loeselia coerulea 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.

  • Cantua caerulea Poir.
  • Hoitzia coerulea Cav.
  • Hoitzia ramosissima M.Martens & Galeotti
  • Loeselia coerulea var. rupestris Brand
  • Loeselia glandulosa var. ramosissima Brand
  • Loeselia ramosissima Walp.
  • Phlox reticulata Sessé & Moc.
  • Phlox reticulata Pav. ex Brand

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.