Lupinus arcticusS.Watson

arctic lupine

WFO wfo-0000168060 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Lupinus arcticus, photographed by Syd Cannings
fig. a Syd Cannings, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-04 / obs. 204653600

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 5 botanical countries

Regions where Lupinus arcticus is native: Alaska, British Columbia, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Yukon AlaskaBritish ColumbiaNorthwest TerritoriesNunavutYukon
Native distribution of Lupinus arcticus, 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
British Columbia BRC
Northwest Territories NWT
Nunavut NUN
Yukon YUK

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 173 in flower of 185 examined

Proportion of examined Lupinus arcticus 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 15 17 88% 66% to 97%
Jun 93 95 98% 93% to 99%
Jul 42 43 98% 88% to 100%
Aug 14 19 74% 51% to 88%
Sep 8 10 80% 49% to 94%
Oct 1 1 too few examined
Nov 0 0 too few examined
Dec 0 0 too few examined

Peak flowering in Jun. Each bar is the share of Lupinus arcticus 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. 173 of 185 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 7 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.

Also published as 23 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.

  • Lupinus arcticus f. albus Cody
  • Lupinus arcticus subsp. canadensis (C.P.Sm.) D.B.Dunn
  • Lupinus arcticus var. arcticus
  • Lupinus arcticus var. subalpinus (Piper & B.L.Rob.) C.P.Sm.
  • Lupinus borealis A.Heller
  • Lupinus cottonii C.P.Sm.
  • Lupinus donnellyensis C.P.Sm.
  • Lupinus gakonensis C.P.Sm.
  • Lupinus glacialis C.P.Sm.
  • Lupinus latifolius var. canadensis C.P.Sm.
  • Lupinus latifolius var. subalpinus (Piper & B.L.Rob.) C.P.Sm.
  • Lupinus multicaulis C.P.Sm.
  • Lupinus multifolius C.P.Sm.
  • Lupinus nootkatensis var. kjellmanii Ostenf.
  • Lupinus polyphyllus subsp. arcticus (S.Watson) E.Phillips
  • Lupinus polyphyllus subsp. arcticus (S.Watson) L.Ll.Phillips
  • Lupinus rainierensis Eastw.
  • Lupinus relictus Hultén
  • Lupinus subalpinus Piper & B.L.Rob.
  • Lupinus toklatensis A.Nelson
  • Lupinus volcanicus Greene
  • Lupinus volcanicus var. rupestricola C.P.Sm.
  • Lupinus yukonensis Greene

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.