Physalis walteri (Walter's groundcherry)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Physalis walteri, photographed by Nonbinary-Naturalist — fig. a Nonbinary-Naturalist, CC0 1.0 / 2022-05-10 / obs. 196645186

Physalis walteri, photographed by Jay Pruett — fig. h Jay Pruett, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 188006019

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.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium: Smithsonian, US National Herbarium
Accession: US 3848633
Filed as: Physalis walteri Nutt.
Det. by: Wen, Jun, (BOT), Smithsonian Institution - National Museum of Natural History (UNITED STATES)
Collected: J. Wen & S. Lutz 2021-09-02
Origin: US
The sheet: View the digitised specimen (CC0 1.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 8 botanical countries

Native distribution of Physalis walteri, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Alabama	ALA	NORTHERN AMERICA
Florida	FLA
Georgia	GEO
Mexico Northeast	MXE
Mississippi	MSI
North Carolina	NCA
South Carolina	SCA
Virginia	VRG

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 395 in flower of 691 examined

51%

73%

72%

64%

61%

37%

45%

56%

31%

46%

60%

62%

Proportion of examined Physalis walteri in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	24	47	51%	37% to 65%
Feb	35	48	73%	59% to 83%
Mar	69	96	72%	62% to 80%
Apr	60	94	64%	54% to 73%
May	68	112	61%	51% to 69%
Jun	22	59	37%	26% to 50%
Jul	23	51	45%	32% to 59%
Aug	28	50	56%	42% to 69%
Sep	12	39	31%	19% to 46%
Oct	13	28	46%	30% to 64%
Nov	15	25	60%	41% to 77%
Dec	26	42	62%	47% to 75%

Peak flowering in Feb. Each bar is the share of Physalis walteri 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. 395 of 691 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 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.

When it blooms, where you are 1 state

State	Peaks	Observations in flower
Florida	Mar	290

Where it actually grows measured, from 1,364 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	5.7 °C	12.6 °C	17.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	27.0 °C	30.1 °C	31.8 °C
Annual rainfall	1,232 mm	1,378 mm	1,588 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	146 mm	205 mm	289 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,364 research-grade observations of Physalis walteri 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 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.

Physalis maritima M.A.Curtis
Physalis viscosa f. latifolia Waterf.
Physalis viscosa subsp. maritima (M.A.Curtis) Waterf.
Physalis viscosa var. maritima (M.A.Curtis) Rydb.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.