Pedicularis palustrisL.

European purple lousewortmarsh lousewort

WFO wfo-0000470843 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Pedicularis palustris, photographed by Jason Grant
fig. a Jason Grant, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-11 / obs. 205230149
Pedicularis palustris, photographed by Elias
fig. b Elias, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204947426
Pedicularis palustris, photographed by Wolfgang Jauch
fig. c Wolfgang Jauch, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 197871092
Pedicularis palustris, photographed by Todd Boland
fig. d Todd Boland, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 150161505
Pedicularis palustris, photographed by Elias
fig. e Elias, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 138164746
Pedicularis palustris, photographed by R Clarke
fig. f R Clarke, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 138960994
Pedicularis palustris, photographed by Wolfgang Jauch
fig. g Wolfgang Jauch, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 135798147
Pedicularis palustris, photographed by Lars Willighagen
fig. h Lars Willighagen, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 179954697

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 33 botanical countries

Regions where Pedicularis palustris is native: Kazakhstan, Mongolia, North Caucasus, Xinjiang, Austria, Baltic States, Belgium, Bulgaria, Central European Russia, Czechia-Slovakia, Denmark, East European Russia, Finland, Føroyar, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, North European Russia, Northwest European Russia, Norway, NW. Balkan Pen., Poland, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Québec KazakhstanMongoliaNorth CaucasusXinjiangAustriaBaltic StatesBelgiumBulgariaCentral European RussiaCzechia-SlovakiaDenmarkEast European RussiaFinlandFranceGermanyHungaryIrelandItalyNetherlandsNorth European RussiaNorthwest European RussiaNorwayNW. Balkan Pen.PolandRomaniaSwedenSwitzerlandUkraineNewfoundlandNova ScotiaQuébec Føroyar
Native distribution of Pedicularis palustris, 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. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Austria AUT EUROPE
Baltic States BLT
Belgium BGM
Bulgaria BUL
Central European Russia RUC
Czechia-Slovakia CZE
Denmark DEN
East European Russia RUE
Finland FIN
Føroyar FOR
France FRA
Germany GER
Great Britain GRB
Hungary HUN
Ireland IRE
Italy ITA
Netherlands NET
North European Russia RUN
Northwest European Russia RUW
Norway NOR
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Poland POL
Romania ROM
Sweden SWE
Switzerland SWI
Ukraine UKR
Kazakhstan KAZ ASIA-TEMPERATE
Mongolia MON
North Caucasus NCS
Xinjiang CHX
Newfoundland NFL NORTHERN AMERICA
Nova Scotia NSC
Québec QUE

Not drawn on the map: Great Britain. We hold no public-domain boundary for this region, so it is listed rather than guessed at.

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 203 in flower of 224 examined

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Pedicularis palustris 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. 203 of 224 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 7 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 2,004 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -14.8 °C -7.5 °C 3.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 14.6 °C 19.1 °C 22.9 °C
Annual rainfall 588 mm 896 mm 1,998 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 94 mm 162 mm 372 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 2,004 research-grade observations of Pedicularis palustris 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.

  • Pedicularis erecta Gilib.
  • Pedicularis insubrica Rota
  • Pedicularis laevicaulis Láng ex Walp.
  • Pedicularis palustris f. laurentiana Vict. & J.Rousseau
  • Pedicularis palustris f. palustris
  • Pedicularis palustris var. borealis J.W.Zetterst.
  • Pedicularis palustris var. parviflora Benth.
  • Pedicularis palustris var. semirosea Behm
  • Pedicularis tenuifolia Adams ex Bunge

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.