Lomatium caruifolium(Hook. & Arn.) J.M.Coult. & Rose

alkali desertparsley

WFO wfo-0001067847 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Lomatium caruifolium, photographed by Arvel Hernandez
fig. a Arvel Hernandez, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-03-20 / obs. 183914276

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
Smithsonian, US National Herbarium
Accession
US 101318
Filed as
Lomatium caruifolium (Hook. & Arn.) J.M.Coult. & Rose
Det. by
Constance, L., (UC), University of California Berkeley
Collected
Collector unknown 1846
Origin
US
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC0 1.0)

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 1 botanical country

Regions where Lomatium caruifolium is native: California California
Native distribution of Lomatium caruifolium, 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
California CAL NORTHERN 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 66 in flower of 70 examined

Proportion of examined Lomatium caruifolium in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 4 4 too few examined
Feb 22 24 92% 74% to 98%
Mar 29 29 100% 88% to 100%
Apr 11 11 100% 74% to 100%
May 0 2 too few examined
Jun 0 0 too few examined
Jul 0 0 too few examined
Aug 0 0 too few examined
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 Mar. Each bar is the share of Lomatium caruifolium 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. 66 of 70 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 231 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 3.7 °C 5.0 °C 12.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 17.2 °C 29.1 °C 32.2 °C
Annual rainfall 481 mm 522 mm 792 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 3 mm 5 mm 10 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 231 research-grade observations of Lomatium caruifolium 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 14 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.

  • Cogswellia caruifolia (Hook. & Arn.) M.E.Jones
  • Ferula caruifolia Hook. & Arn.
  • Ferula carvifolia Hook. & Arn.
  • Leptotaenia anomala J.M.Coult. & Rose
  • Leptotaenia humilis J.M.Coult. & Rose
  • Leptotaenia humilis var. denticulata Jeps.
  • Lomatium alatum var. purpureum Jeps.
  • Lomatium caruifolium var. erythropodum Jeps.
  • Lomatium caruifolium var. purpureum (Jeps.) Mathias
  • Lomatium caruifolium var. solanense Jeps.
  • Lomatium humile (J.M.Coult. & Rose) Hoover ex Mathias & Constance
  • Peucedanum californicum Nutt.
  • Peucedanum caruifolium (Hook. & Arn.) Torr. & A.Gray
  • Peucedanum erosum Jeps.

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.