Orobanche californicaCham. & Schltdl.

California broomrape

WFO wfo-0001089210 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Orobanche californica, photographed by Kristen Francis
fig. a Kristen Francis, CC0 1.0 / 2022-06-06 / obs. 204794111

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
02698004
Filed as
Orobanche californica subsp. feudgei (Munz) Heckard
Det. by
L. T. Collins; A. E. L. Colwell; G. A. Yatskievych 2015-01-01
Collected
N. H. Holmgren 1966-05-28
Origin
US
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

Regions where Orobanche californica is native: British Columbia, California, Mexico Northwest, Oregon, Washington British ColumbiaCaliforniaMexico NorthwestOregonWashington
Native distribution of Orobanche californica, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
British Columbia BRC NORTHERN AMERICA
California CAL
Mexico Northwest MXN
Oregon ORE
Washington WAS

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 146 in flower of 156 examined

Proportion of examined Orobanche californica in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 1 1 too few examined
Feb 0 1 too few examined
Mar 0 0 too few examined
Apr 4 4 too few examined
May 28 28 100% 88% to 100%
Jun 44 50 88% 76% to 94%
Jul 27 29 93% 78% to 98%
Aug 25 26 96% 81% to 99%
Sep 11 11 100% 74% to 100%
Oct 6 6 100% 61% to 100%
Nov 0 0 too few examined
Dec 0 0 too few examined

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Orobanche californica 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. 146 of 156 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 6 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 788 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -0.1 °C 5.1 °C 9.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 16.4 °C 17.6 °C 28.8 °C
Annual rainfall 412 mm 879 mm 1,857 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 7 mm 73 mm 131 mm

It is found where winters bring light 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 788 research-grade observations of Orobanche californica 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 28 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.

  • Anoplanthus comosus (A.Gray) Walp.
  • Aphyllon californicum (Cham. & Schltdl.) A.Gray
  • Aphyllon californicum subsp. condensum (Heckard) A.C.Schneid.
  • Aphyllon californicum subsp. feudgei (Munz) A.C.Schneid.
  • Aphyllon californicum subsp. grande (Heckard) A.C.Schneid.
  • Aphyllon californicum subsp. grayanum (Beck) A.C.Schneid.
  • Aphyllon californicum subsp. jepsonii (Munz) A.C.Schneid.
  • Aphyllon comosum A.Gray
  • Aphyllon violaceum Eastw.
  • Myzorrhiza californica Rydb.
  • Myzorrhiza californica subsp. grayana (Beck) Uhlich
  • Myzorrhiza comosa (Walp.) Holub
  • Myzorrhiza grayana Rydb.
  • Myzorrhiza hutchinsoniana Davidson
  • Myzorrhiza violacea (Eastw.) Rydb.
  • Orobanche californica var. typica Munz
  • Orobanche carnosa J.G.Cooper
  • Orobanche comosa Hook.
  • Orobanche comosa var. violacea (Eastw.) Jeps.
  • Orobanche grayana Beck
  • Orobanche grayana var. feudgei Munz
  • Orobanche grayana var. jepsonii Munz
  • Orobanche grayana var. nelsonii Munz
  • Orobanche grayana var. typica Munz

and 4 more.

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.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. 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.