Mertensia ciliata(E.James ex Torr.) G.Don

mountain bluebells

WFO wfo-0001215341 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Mertensia ciliata, photographed by Wendy Vigo Waring
fig. a Wendy Vigo Waring, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-07-24 / obs. 147830383
Mertensia ciliata, photographed by Mike Duran
fig. b Mike Duran, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203662137
Mertensia ciliata, photographed by Kayla Sweeten
fig. c Kayla Sweeten, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 149788648
Mertensia ciliata, photographed by Steve Woodward
fig. d Steve Woodward, CC0 1.0 / obs. 141187833
Mertensia ciliata, photographed by Mike Duran
fig. e Mike Duran, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 142367546
Mertensia ciliata, photographed by Reid Hardin
fig. f Reid Hardin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 144567444
Mertensia ciliata, photographed by Abra Zobel
fig. g Abra Zobel, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 142804867
Mertensia ciliata, photographed by John Brew
fig. h John Brew, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 156463599

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.

Confused withby our own model

These are not lookalikes we guessed at. Each one is a species our identification model genuinely mistook for this plant, and how many times. The error rate is published.

Flowering n = 975 observations

Peak flowering in Jul, from 975 community-annotated observations worldwide. This is a global aggregate, not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres, and citizen-science records cluster near cities, at weekends, and in spring. Where a species has fewer than 30 annotated records we do not draw this chart at all.

Also published as 15 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.

  • Mertensia ciliata var. ciliata
  • Mertensia ciliata var. latiloba L.O.Williams
  • Mertensia ciliata var. polyphylla A.Nelson
  • Mertensia ciliata var. punctata A.Nelson
  • Mertensia ciliata var. subpubescens (Rydb.) J.F.Macbr. & Payson
  • Mertensia incongruens J.F.Macbr. & Payson
  • Mertensia pallida Rydb.
  • Mertensia picta Rydb.
  • Mertensia platensis (Rydb.) Rydb.
  • Mertensia polyphylla Greene
  • Mertensia polyphylla var. platensis Rydb.
  • Mertensia punctata Greene
  • Mertensia stomatechoides Kellogg
  • Mertensia subpubescens Rydb.
  • Pulmonaria ciliata E.James ex Torr.

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.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice, no toxicity claim and no native range, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.