Phormium colensoiHérincq

Mountain flax

WFO wfo-0000717174 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Phormium colensoi, photographed by Tony Wills
fig. a Tony Wills, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-04-30 / obs. 192480213

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.

Confused withby our own model

These are not lookalikes we guessed at. Each one is a species our identification model genuinely mistook for this plant, and how many times. The error rate is published.

Flowering n = 247 observations

Flowering observations of Phormium colensoi by month
MonthObservations
Jan31
Feb2
Mar1
Apr2
May1
Jun2
Jul1
Aug2
Sep9
Oct50
Nov86
Dec60

Peak flowering in Nov, from 247 community-annotated observations worldwide. This is a global aggregate, not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres, and citizen-science records cluster near cities, at weekends, and in spring. Where a species has fewer than 30 annotated records we do not draw this chart at all.

Also published as 4 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.

  • Phormium cookianum Le Jol.
  • Phormium cookianum subsp. hookeri (Gunn) Wardle
  • Phormium forsterianum Hook.
  • Phormium hookeri Gunn ex Hook.f.

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.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice, no toxicity claim and no native range, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.