Malaxis macrostachya (Chiricahua adder's-mouth orchid)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Malaxis macrostachya, photographed by Rosario Douglas — fig. a Rosario Douglas, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-09-07 / obs. 155973483

Malaxis macrostachya, photographed by Laura Gaudette — fig. b Laura Gaudette, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 51232942

Malaxis macrostachya, photographed by Cecelia Alexander — fig. e Cecelia Alexander, CC0 1.0 / obs. 24631752

Malaxis macrostachya, photographed by Adam J. Searcy — fig. g Adam J. Searcy, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 166730974

Malaxis macrostachya, photographed by Alex Abair — fig. h Alex Abair, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 22667616

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 15 botanical countries

Native distribution of Malaxis macrostachya, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Arizona	ARI	NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Central	MXC
Mexico Gulf	MXG
Mexico Northeast	MXE
Mexico Northwest	MXN
Mexico Southeast	MXT
Mexico Southwest	MXS
New Mexico	NWM
Texas	TEX
Costa Rica	COS	SOUTHERN AMERICA
El Salvador	ELS
Guatemala	GUA
Honduras	HON
Nicaragua	NIC
Panamá	PAN

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 50 in flower of 70 examined

83%

78%

50%

Proportion of examined Malaxis macrostachya in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	4	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	4	too few examined
Jul	10	12	83%	55% to 95%
Aug	29	37	78%	63% to 89%
Sep	5	10	50%	24% to 76%
Oct	3	3	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 Malaxis macrostachya 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. 50 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 228 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-9.1 °C	-4.2 °C	5.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	19.6 °C	25.5 °C	29.3 °C
Annual rainfall	470 mm	595 mm	1,325 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	26 mm	53 mm	83 mm

It is found where winters bring hard frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 228 research-grade observations of Malaxis macrostachya 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 7 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.

Achroanthes montana (Engelm. ex Rothr.) Greene
Malaxis densiflora A.Rich. & Galeotti ex Ridl.
Malaxis montana (Engelm. ex Rothr.) Kuntze
Malaxis soulei L.O.Williams
Microstylis macrostachya (Lex.) Lindl.
Microstylis montana Engelm. ex Rothr.
Ophrys macrostachya Lex.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
USDA PLANTS Database. common name, checklist symbol MASO8. public domain. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.