Minthostachys mollis

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 6 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 6 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Minthostachys mollis, photographed by Skjold Søndergaard — fig. a Skjold Søndergaard, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-11-02 / obs. 167174734

Minthostachys mollis, photographed by Tony Rebelo — fig. b Tony Rebelo, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 31084242

Minthostachys mollis, photographed by Franklin Checa — fig. d Franklin Checa, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 33772663

Minthostachys mollis, photographed by Diego F. Cisneros-Heredia — fig. e Diego F. Cisneros-Heredia, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 140491146

Minthostachys mollis, photographed by David Parra Puente — fig. f David Parra Puente, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 134037307

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: The New York Botanical Garden
Accession: 02852531
Filed as: Minthostachys mollis (Benth.) Griseb.
Det. by: L. J. Walsingham 2012-01-01
Collected: J. D. Boeke 1977-01-01
Origin: EC
The sheet: View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

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 5 botanical countries

Native distribution of Minthostachys mollis, 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
Bolivia	BOL	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Colombia	CLM
Ecuador	ECU
Peru	PER
Venezuela	VEN

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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 188 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	0.6 °C	6.5 °C	9.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	13.3 °C	16.3 °C	18.4 °C
Annual rainfall	903 mm	1,501 mm	2,777 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	47 mm	153 mm	335 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 188 research-grade observations of Minthostachys mollis 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.

Also published as 10 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.

Bystropogon canus Benth.
Bystropogon confertus Willd. ex Steud.
Bystropogon mandonianus Briq.
Bystropogon mollis Kunth
Bystropogon pavonianus Briq.
Bystropogon reticulatus Willd. ex Steud.
Bystropogon tomentosus Benth.
Mentha mollis Benth.
Minthostachys mandoniana (Briq.) Epling
Minthostachys tomentosa (Benth.) Epling

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.
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.