Plantago patagonica (woolly plantain)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Plantago patagonica, photographed by Cleveland Powell — fig. a Cleveland Powell, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-11 / obs. 205823363

Plantago patagonica, photographed by Bobby McCabe — fig. b Bobby McCabe, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 194576768

Plantago patagonica, photographed by Millie Basden — fig. c Millie Basden, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 192025571

Plantago patagonica, photographed by Samuel A Schmid, PhD, PWS — fig. e Samuel A Schmid, PhD, PWS, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 183598806

Plantago patagonica, photographed by Rachel Stringham — fig. f Rachel Stringham, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 183659885

Plantago patagonica, photographed by aacocucci — fig. h aacocucci, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 165449775

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: 1060592
Filed as: Plantago patagonica Jacq.
Det. by: K. Rahn 1975-01-01
Collected: E. James
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 48 botanical countries

Native distribution of Plantago patagonica, 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
Alberta	ABT	NORTHERN AMERICA
Arizona	ARI
Arkansas	ARK
British Columbia	BRC
California	CAL
Colorado	COL
Georgia	GEO
Idaho	IDA
Illinois	ILL
Indiana	INI
Iowa	IOW
Kansas	KAN
Louisiana	LOU
Maine	MAI
Manitoba	MAN
Massachusetts	MAS
Mexico Northeast	MXE
Mexico Northwest	MXN
Michigan	MIC
Minnesota	MIN
Missouri	MSO
Montana	MNT
Nebraska	NEB
Nevada	NEV
New Hampshire	NWH
New Jersey	NWJ
New Mexico	NWM
New York	NWY
North Carolina	NCA
North Dakota	NDA
Ohio	OHI
Oklahoma	OKL
Oregon	ORE
Saskatchewan	SAS
South Carolina	SCA
South Dakota	SDA
Tennessee	TEN
Texas	TEX
Utah	UTA
Vermont	VER
Virginia	VRG
Washington	WAS
West Virginia	WVA
Wisconsin	WIS
Wyoming	WYO
Argentina Northeast	AGE	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Argentina Northwest	AGW
Argentina South	AGS

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 282 in flower of 348 examined

60%

93%

90%

86%

87%

29%

44%

77%

100%

Proportion of examined Plantago patagonica in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	3	4	too few examined
Feb	2	3	too few examined
Mar	21	35	60%	44% to 74%
Apr	57	61	93%	84% to 97%
May	74	82	90%	82% to 95%
Jun	62	72	86%	76% to 92%
Jul	34	39	87%	73% to 94%
Aug	6	21	29%	14% to 50%
Sep	4	9	44%	19% to 73%
Oct	10	13	77%	50% to 92%
Nov	6	6	100%	61% to 100%
Dec	3	3	too few examined

Peak flowering in Nov. Each bar is the share of Plantago patagonica 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. 282 of 348 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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 2,001 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-13.8 °C	-6.1 °C	4.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	26.0 °C	30.1 °C	37.4 °C
Annual rainfall	234 mm	391 mm	883 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	20 mm	44 mm	99 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 2,001 research-grade observations of Plantago patagonica 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 32 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.

Plantago candicans Decne.
Plantago canescens Schrad. ex Decne.
Plantago gnaphalioides Nutt.
Plantago ignota E.Morris
Plantago limarensis F.Phil. ex Phil.
Plantago oblonga E.Morris
Plantago patagonica f. glabrescens Pilg.
Plantago patagonica f. vestita Pilg.
Plantago patagonica var. breviscapa (Shinners) Shinners
Plantago patagonica var. erecta Pilg.
Plantago patagonica var. gnaphalioides (Nutt.) A.Gray
Plantago patagonica var. gnaphaloides (Nutt.) A.Gray
Plantago patagonica var. gracilescens Speg.
Plantago patagonica var. limarensis (F.Phil. ex Phil.) Reiche
Plantago patagonica var. majuscula Pilg.
Plantago patagonica var. minuscula Speg.
Plantago patagonica var. oblonga (E.Morris) Shinners
Plantago patagonica var. patagonica
Plantago patagonica var. spinulosa (Decne.) A.Gray
Plantago patagonica var. typica Speg.
Plantago picta E.Morris
Plantago purshii Roem. & Schult.
Plantago purshii var. breviscapa Shinners
Plantago purshii var. oblonga (E.Morris) Shinners

and 8 more.

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.