Ribes malvaceum (chaparral currant)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Ribes malvaceum, photographed by Dan Horowitz — fig. a Dan Horowitz, CC0 1.0 / 2022-02-19 / obs. 180844626

Ribes malvaceum, photographed by George Williams — fig. c George Williams, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 177770786

Ribes malvaceum, photographed by joergmlpts — fig. f joergmlpts, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 176327400

Ribes malvaceum, photographed by Henrik Kibak — fig. g Henrik Kibak, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 175625961

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.

Native range 2 botanical countries

Native distribution of Ribes malvaceum, 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
California	CAL	NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Northwest	MXN

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 719 in flower of 825 examined

96%

97%

86%

62%

25%

58%

86%

95%

Proportion of examined Ribes malvaceum in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	212	221	96%	92% to 98%
Feb	181	187	97%	93% to 99%
Mar	80	93	86%	78% to 92%
Apr	31	50	62%	48% to 74%
May	7	28	25%	13% to 43%
Jun	0	9	0%	0% to 30%
Jul	1	3	too few examined
Aug	0	5	0%	0% to 43%
Sep	1	3	too few examined
Oct	7	12	58%	32% to 81%
Nov	51	59	86%	75% to 93%
Dec	148	155	95%	91% to 98%

Peak flowering in Feb. Each bar is the share of Ribes malvaceum 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. 719 of 825 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 2 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.

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.

Ribes malvaceum var. clementinum Dunkle
Ribes malvaceum var. malvaceum
Ribes malvaceum var. viridifolium Abrams
Ribes polystachyum A.Berger
Ribes purpurascens A.Heller
Ribes viridifolium (Abrams) A.Heller
Ribes watkinsii Eastw.

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.