Phacelia platycarpa(Cav.) Spreng.

WFO wfo-0001066967 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Phacelia platycarpa, photographed by Alexis López Hernández
fig. a Alexis López Hernández, CC BY 4.0 / 2020-07-19 / obs. 87352088
Phacelia platycarpa, photographed by Alexis López Hernández
fig. b Alexis López Hernández, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 87352070
Phacelia platycarpa, photographed by Alexis López Hernández
fig. c Alexis López Hernández, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 87352052
Phacelia platycarpa, photographed by Alexis López Hernández
fig. d Alexis López Hernández, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 87345426
Phacelia platycarpa, photographed by Martín Sánchez Vilchis
fig. e Martín Sánchez Vilchis, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 82998802
Phacelia platycarpa, photographed by Fabien Anthelme
fig. f Fabien Anthelme, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 89243524
Phacelia platycarpa, photographed by Dante S. Figueroa
fig. g Dante S. Figueroa, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 46883217
Phacelia platycarpa, photographed by Alan Rockefeller
fig. h Alan Rockefeller, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 46876898

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 7 botanical countries

Regions where Phacelia platycarpa is native: Mexico Central, Mexico Gulf, Mexico Northeast, Mexico Northwest, Mexico Southeast, Mexico Southwest, Guatemala Mexico CentralMexico GulfMexico NortheastMexico NorthwestMexico SoutheastMexico SouthwestGuatemala
Native distribution of Phacelia platycarpa, 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
Mexico Central MXC NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Gulf MXG
Mexico Northeast MXE
Mexico Northwest MXN
Mexico Southeast MXT
Mexico Southwest MXS
Guatemala GUA SOUTHERN AMERICA

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 59 in flower of 61 examined

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Phacelia platycarpa 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. 59 of 61 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 446 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -2.6 °C 1.3 °C 6.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 16.1 °C 20.2 °C 27.7 °C
Annual rainfall 728 mm 1,291 mm 1,709 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 27 mm 46 mm 86 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 446 research-grade observations of Phacelia platycarpa 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 18 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.

  • Convolvulus platycarpos Cav.
  • Cosmanthus mexicanus A.DC.
  • Eutoca acaulis M.Martens & Galeotti
  • Eutoca andrieuxii A.DC.
  • Eutoca mexicana Benth.
  • Eutoca pimpinelloides Spreng.
  • Phacelia acaulis (M.Martens & Galeotti) Brand
  • Phacelia madrensis Greenm.
  • Phacelia patuliflora var. mexicana Brand
  • Phacelia pimpinelloides A.Gray
  • Phacelia platycarpa var. platycarpa
  • Phacelia pubescens Poir.
  • Phacelia rupicola B.L.Rob. & Fernald
  • Phacelia rupicola var. madrensis (Greenm.) Brand
  • Polemonium achillaeifolium Willd. ex Roem. & Schult.
  • Polemonium achilleifolium Willd. ex Roem. & Schult.
  • Polemonium bursifolium Willd. ex Roem. & Schult.
  • Polemonium pimpinelloides Willd. ex Roem. & Schult.

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. 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.