Monardella nana (yellow monardella)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Monardella nana, photographed by Millie Basden — fig. a Millie Basden, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-05 / obs. 204725583

Monardella nana, photographed by desertnaturalist — fig. b desertnaturalist, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 72379923

Monardella nana, photographed by George Raymond — fig. c George Raymond, CC0 1.0 / obs. 42643671

Monardella nana, photographed by Tom and T Herman — fig. d Tom and T Herman, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 85421956

Monardella nana, photographed by Dee Shea Himes — fig. f Dee Shea Himes, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 200768956

Monardella nana, photographed by Trevor Van Loon — fig. h Trevor Van Loon, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 191070777

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 2 botanical countries

Native distribution of Monardella nana, 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
California	CAL	NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Northwest	MXN

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 155 in flower of 216 examined

20%

76%

91%

84%

58%

33%

Proportion of examined Monardella nana in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	1	1	too few examined
Feb	0	0	too few examined
Mar	0	5	0%	0% to 43%
Apr	2	10	20%	6% to 51%
May	37	49	76%	62% to 85%
Jun	52	57	91%	81% to 96%
Jul	52	62	84%	73% to 91%
Aug	7	12	58%	32% to 81%
Sep	2	6	33%	10% to 70%
Oct	2	6	33%	10% to 70%
Nov	0	3	too few examined
Dec	0	5	0%	0% to 43%

Peak flowering in Jun. Each bar is the share of Monardella nana 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. 155 of 216 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 3 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 611 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-6.6 °C	-0.4 °C	2.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	25.1 °C	29.4 °C	34.2 °C
Annual rainfall	222 mm	466 mm	591 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	14 mm	21 mm	29 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 611 research-grade observations of Monardella nana 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 9 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.

Madronella nana (A.Gray) Greene
Monardella macrantha subsp. nana (A.Gray) Epling
Monardella macrantha var. arida H.M.Hall
Monardella macrantha var. nana (A.Gray) A.Gray
Monardella nana var. arida (H.M.Hall) Abrams
Monardella nana var. leptosiphon (Torr.) Abrams
Monardella nana var. tenuiflora (S.Watson ex A.Gray) Abrams
Monardella tenuiflora S.Watson ex A.Gray
Monardella villosa var. leptosiphon Torr.

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.