Mertensia lanceolata (foothill mertensia)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Mertensia lanceolata, photographed by Ellen C Lovelidge — fig. a Ellen C Lovelidge, CC0 1.0 / 2022-05-14 / obs. 197623470

Mertensia lanceolata, photographed by Bob Walker — fig. b Bob Walker, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 193616960

Mertensia lanceolata, photographed by Shalana Gray — fig. c Shalana Gray, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 191688968

Mertensia lanceolata, photographed by Anders Hastings — fig. d Anders Hastings, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 188633140

Mertensia lanceolata, photographed by Alaina Krakowiak — fig. e Alaina Krakowiak, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 187140719

Mertensia lanceolata, photographed by Elliott Gordon — fig. f Elliott Gordon, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 140547630

Mertensia lanceolata, photographed by Jeff Birek — fig. g Jeff Birek, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 137827623

Mertensia lanceolata, photographed by Henry Mulligan — fig. h Henry Mulligan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 130603017

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 11 botanical countries

Native distribution of Mertensia lanceolata, 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
Alberta	ABT	NORTHERN AMERICA
Colorado	COL
Manitoba	MAN
Montana	MNT
Nebraska	NEB
New Mexico	NWM
North Dakota	NDA
Saskatchewan	SAS
South Dakota	SDA
Utah	UTA
Wyoming	WYO

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 164 in flower of 169 examined

98%

96%

100%

Proportion of examined Mertensia lanceolata 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	58	59	98%	91% to 100%
May	68	71	96%	88% to 99%
Jun	22	23	96%	79% to 99%
Jul	13	13	100%	77% to 100%
Aug	3	3	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 Jul. Each bar is the share of Mertensia lanceolata 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. 164 of 169 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 8 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 1,581 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-18.4 °C	-8.9 °C	-7.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	18.7 °C	27.2 °C	29.0 °C
Annual rainfall	404 mm	499 mm	907 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	34 mm	60 mm	163 mm

It is found where winters are severely cold. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,581 research-grade observations of Mertensia lanceolata 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 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.

Casselia lanceolata (Pursh) Dumort.
Cerinthodes lanceolata Kuntze
Lithospermum marginatum Spreng.
Mertensia clokeyi Osterh.
Mertensia coriacea A.Nelson
Mertensia coriacea var. dilatata A.Nelson
Mertensia lanceolata var. aperta Cockerell
Mertensia marginata G.Don
Mertensia media Osterh.
Mertensia micrantha A.Nelson
Mertensia papillosa Greene
Mertensia secundorum Cockerell
Mertensia viridis var. dilatata (A.Nelson) L.O.Williams
Pulmonaria lanceolata Pursh
Pulmonaria marginata Nutt.

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.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. 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.