Parnassia asarifoliaVent.

kidneyleaf grass of Parnassus

WFO wfo-0001135399 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Parnassia asarifolia, photographed by Michelle W. (鍾偉瑋)
fig. a Michelle W. (鍾偉瑋), CC BY 4.0 / 2021-10-16 / obs. 163909443

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

Regions where Parnassia asarifolia is native: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia AlabamaArkansasGeorgiaKentuckyMarylandNorth CarolinaSouth CarolinaTennesseeTexasVirginiaWest Virginia
Native distribution of Parnassia asarifolia, 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
Alabama ALA NORTHERN AMERICA
Arkansas ARK
Georgia GEO
Kentucky KTY
Maryland MRY
North Carolina NCA
South Carolina SCA
Tennessee TEN
Texas TEX
Virginia VRG
West Virginia WVA

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 292 in flower of 305 examined

Proportion of examined Parnassia asarifolia 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 0 0 too few examined
May 0 1 too few examined
Jun 0 0 too few examined
Jul 2 2 too few examined
Aug 90 96 94% 87% to 97%
Sep 146 148 99% 95% to 100%
Oct 47 51 92% 82% to 97%
Nov 7 7 100% 65% to 100%
Dec 0 0 too few examined

Peak flowering in Nov. Each bar is the share of Parnassia asarifolia 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. 292 of 305 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 557 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -8.2 °C -4.0 °C 1.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 18.9 °C 24.9 °C 30.5 °C
Annual rainfall 1,270 mm 1,807 mm 2,038 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 262 mm 367 mm 448 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 557 research-grade observations of Parnassia asarifolia 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 1 synonym

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.

  • Parnassia nudata Raf.

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.