Palmerella debilisA.Gray

Dunn's lobelia

WFO wfo-0000818004 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Palmerella debilis, photographed by George Williams
fig. a George Williams, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-10-21 / obs. 164860519
Palmerella debilis, photographed by George Williams
fig. b George Williams, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 164859431
Palmerella debilis, photographed by George Williams
fig. c George Williams, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 160773987
Palmerella debilis, photographed by George Williams
fig. d George Williams, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 160769863
Palmerella debilis, photographed by George Williams
fig. e George Williams, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 160780433
Palmerella debilis, photographed by George Williams
fig. f George Williams, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 140489154
Palmerella debilis, photographed by George Williams
fig. g George Williams, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 106809706
Palmerella debilis, photographed by George Williams
fig. h George Williams, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 105686994

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

Regions where Palmerella debilis is native: California, Mexico Northwest CaliforniaMexico Northwest
Native distribution of Palmerella debilis, 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
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 106 in flower of 113 examined

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Palmerella debilis 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. 106 of 113 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.

Also published as 6 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.

  • Laurentia debilis (A.Gray) McVaugh
  • Laurentia debilis var. serrata (A.Gray) McVaugh
  • Lobelia dunnii Greene
  • Lobelia dunnii var. serrata (A.Gray) McVaugh
  • Lobelia rothrockii Greene
  • Palmerella debilis var. serrata A.Gray

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. USDA PLANTS Database. common name, checklist symbol LODU. public domain. 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.