Pycnanthemum flexuosum(Walter) Britton, Sterns & Poggenb.

Appalachian mountainmint

WFO wfo-0000288997 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Pycnanthemum flexuosum, photographed by Becky Dill
fig. a Becky Dill, CC0 1.0 / 2020-06-24 / obs. 80736739
Pycnanthemum flexuosum, photographed by Ashwin Srinivasan
fig. b Ashwin Srinivasan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 21732088
Pycnanthemum flexuosum, photographed by Alan Weakley
fig. c Alan Weakley, CC0 1.0 / obs. 204229091
Pycnanthemum flexuosum, photographed by Becky Dill
fig. d Becky Dill, CC0 1.0 / obs. 166356254
Pycnanthemum flexuosum, photographed by John Kees
fig. e John Kees, CC0 1.0 / obs. 165033530
Pycnanthemum flexuosum, photographed by John Kees
fig. f John Kees, CC0 1.0 / obs. 163899254
Pycnanthemum flexuosum, photographed by Becky Dill
fig. g Becky Dill, CC0 1.0 / obs. 144515240
Pycnanthemum flexuosum, photographed by Becky Dill
fig. h Becky Dill, CC0 1.0 / obs. 138457793

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
00042640
Filed as
Pycnanthemum flexuosum (Walter) Britton, Sterns & Poggenb.
Det. by
J. B. Walker 1994-01-01
Collected
J. B. Walker 1994-10-10
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 8 botanical countries

Regions where Pycnanthemum flexuosum is native: Alabama, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia AlabamaFloridaGeorgiaMississippiNorth CarolinaSouth CarolinaVirginia District of Columbia
Native distribution of Pycnanthemum flexuosum, 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. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Alabama ALA NORTHERN AMERICA
District of Columbia WDC
Florida FLA
Georgia GEO
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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 195 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 0.5 °C 1.9 °C 7.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 29.3 °C 31.5 °C 32.2 °C
Annual rainfall 1,135 mm 1,248 mm 1,556 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 224 mm 254 mm 291 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 195 research-grade observations of Pycnanthemum flexuosum 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.

Also published as 10 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.

  • Brachystemum linifolium Willd.
  • Koellia aristata Kuntze
  • Koellia capitata Moench
  • Koellia flexuosa (Walter) MacMill.
  • Koellia hugeri Small
  • Nepeta virginica L.
  • Origanum flexuosum Walter
  • Pycnanthemum aristatum Michx.
  • Pycnanthemum linifolium (Willd.) Pursh
  • Pycnanthemum virginicum (L.) Pers.

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.