Pycnanthemum verticillatum(Michx.) Pers.

whorled mountainmint

WFO wfo-0000289036 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 6 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 6 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Pycnanthemum verticillatum, photographed by Zihao Wang
fig. a Zihao Wang, CC BY 4.0 / 2015-07-17 / obs. 94517958

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
02696566
Filed as
Pycnanthemum verticillatum (Michx.) Pers.
Det. by
E. Grant 1939-01-01
Collected
W. H. Leggett 1869-07-22
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 26 botanical countries

Regions where Pycnanthemum verticillatum is native: Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Ontario, Pennsylvania, Rhode I., Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia AlabamaArkansasConnecticutGeorgiaIllinoisIowaKansasKentuckyMarylandMassachusettsMichiganMissouriNebraskaNew JerseyNew YorkNorth CarolinaOhioOklahomaOntarioPennsylvaniaTennesseeTexasVermontVirginiaWest Virginia Rhode I.
Native distribution of Pycnanthemum verticillatum, 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
Arkansas ARK
Connecticut CNT
Georgia GEO
Illinois ILL
Iowa IOW
Kansas KAN
Kentucky KTY
Maryland MRY
Massachusetts MAS
Michigan MIC
Missouri MSO
Nebraska NEB
New Jersey NWJ
New York NWY
North Carolina NCA
Ohio OHI
Oklahoma OKL
Ontario ONT
Pennsylvania PEN
Rhode I. RHO
Tennessee TEN
Texas TEX
Vermont VER
Virginia VRG
West Virginia WVA

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 76 in flower of 106 examined

Proportion of examined Pycnanthemum verticillatum in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 0 too few examined
Feb 0 0 too few examined
Mar 0 0 too few examined
Apr 0 0 too few examined
May 0 8 0% 0% to 32%
Jun 2 10 20% 6% to 51%
Jul 35 45 78% 64% to 87%
Aug 30 30 100% 89% to 100%
Sep 9 11 82% 52% to 95%
Oct 0 1 too few examined
Nov 0 1 too few examined
Dec 0 0 too few examined

Peak flowering in Aug. Each bar is the share of Pycnanthemum verticillatum 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. 76 of 106 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 7 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 298 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -13.0 °C -5.4 °C 1.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 26.7 °C 28.9 °C 31.8 °C
Annual rainfall 839 mm 1,085 mm 1,390 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 89 mm 197 mm 289 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 298 research-grade observations of Pycnanthemum verticillatum 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 14 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 verticillatum Michx.
  • Koellia dubia (A.Gray) Briq.
  • Koellia leptodon (A.Gray) Kuntze
  • Koellia pilosa (Nutt.) Baill.
  • Koellia verticillata (Michx.) Kuntze
  • Koellia verticillata var. glabrior Kuntze
  • Koellia verticillata var. pilosa Kuntze
  • Pycnanthemum dubium A.Gray
  • Pycnanthemum leptodon A.Gray
  • Pycnanthemum muticum var. pilosum (Nutt.) Hook.
  • Pycnanthemum pilosum Nutt.
  • Pycnanthemum torreyi var. leptodon (A.Gray) Boomhour ex Fernald & B.G.Schub.
  • Pycnanthemum tullia var. dubium (A.Gray) A.Gray
  • Pycnanthemum virginianum var. verticillatum (Michx.) B.Boivin

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.