Pinguicula luteaWalter

yellow butterwort

WFO wfo-0001072701 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Pinguicula lutea, photographed by Kim
fig. a Kim, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-04-13 / obs. 188086136

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
The New York Botanical Garden
Accession
30635
Filed as
Pinguicula lutea Walter
Det. by
not recorded on this sheet
Collected
Collector unspecified
Origin
US
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

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 7 botanical countries

Regions where Pinguicula lutea is native: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina AlabamaFloridaGeorgiaLouisianaMississippiNorth CarolinaSouth Carolina
Native distribution of Pinguicula lutea, 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
Florida FLA
Georgia GEO
Louisiana LOU
Mississippi MSI
North Carolina NCA
South Carolina SCA

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 305 in flower of 380 examined

Proportion of examined Pinguicula lutea in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 12 24 50% 31% to 69%
Feb 51 68 75% 64% to 84%
Mar 176 178 99% 96% to 100%
Apr 59 62 95% 87% to 98%
May 5 7 71% 36% to 92%
Jun 0 3 too few examined
Jul 0 9 0% 0% to 30%
Aug 0 7 0% 0% to 35%
Sep 0 4 too few examined
Oct 0 4 too few examined
Nov 0 5 0% 0% to 43%
Dec 2 9 22% 6% to 55%

Peak flowering in Mar. Each bar is the share of Pinguicula lutea 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. 305 of 380 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 3 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.

When it blooms, where you are 2 states

StatePeaksObservations in flower
Florida Feb 109
Mississippi Mar 151

Where it actually grows measured, from 1,499 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 4.9 °C 8.3 °C 17.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 29.3 °C 31.5 °C 32.4 °C
Annual rainfall 1,322 mm 1,527 mm 1,860 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 159 mm 281 mm 361 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 1,499 research-grade observations of Pinguicula lutea 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 7 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.

  • Isoloba lutea (Walter) Raf.
  • Isoloba recurva Raf.
  • Pinguicula campanulata Lam.
  • Pinguicula edentula Hook.
  • Pinguicula lutea f. alba Folkerts & J.D.Freeman
  • Pinguicula lutea var. edentula (Hook.) A.DC.
  • Pinguicula lutea var. minor A.DC.

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.