Stephanomeria pauciflora (brownplume wirelettuce)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Stephanomeria pauciflora, photographed by Bobby McCabe — fig. a Bobby McCabe, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-11 / obs. 205236848

Stephanomeria pauciflora, photographed by Andrew Tree — fig. b Andrew Tree, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204433551

Stephanomeria pauciflora, photographed by Dominic Gentilcore — fig. c Dominic Gentilcore, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 198531988

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 13 botanical countries

Native distribution of Stephanomeria pauciflora, 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
Arizona	ARI	NORTHERN AMERICA
California	CAL
Colorado	COL
Kansas	KAN
Mexico Northeast	MXE
Mexico Northwest	MXN
Nevada	NEV
New Mexico	NWM
Oklahoma	OKL
Oregon	ORE
Texas	TEX
Utah	UTA
Wyoming	WYO

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 617 in flower of 742 examined

72%

40%

37%

76%

95%

86%

85%

100%

86%

91%

99%

86%

Proportion of examined Stephanomeria pauciflora in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	39	54	72%	59% to 82%
Feb	12	30	40%	25% to 58%
Mar	13	35	37%	23% to 54%
Apr	82	108	76%	67% to 83%
May	95	100	95%	89% to 98%
Jun	59	69	86%	75% to 92%
Jul	23	27	85%	68% to 94%
Aug	15	15	100%	80% to 100%
Sep	31	36	86%	71% to 94%
Oct	59	65	91%	81% to 96%
Nov	108	109	99%	95% to 100%
Dec	81	94	86%	78% to 92%

Peak flowering in Aug. Each bar is the share of Stephanomeria pauciflora 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. 617 of 742 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 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 2,010 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-5.8 °C	3.9 °C	8.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	30.5 °C	37.4 °C	41.1 °C
Annual rainfall	112 mm	236 mm	477 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	6 mm	15 mm	52 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 2,010 research-grade observations of Stephanomeria pauciflora 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 13 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.

Jamesia pauciflora (Torr.) Nees
Lygodesmia pauciflora (Torr.) Shinners
Prenanthes pauciflora Torr.
Ptiloria cinerea S.F.Blake
Ptiloria divaricata Greene
Ptiloria lygodesmoides A.Heller
Ptiloria pauciflora (Torr.) Raf.
Stephanomeria cinerea (S.F.Blake) S.F.Blake
Stephanomeria haleyi Eastw.
Stephanomeria lygodesmoides M.E.Jones
Stephanomeria lygodesmoides M.E.Jones ex L.F.Hend.
Stephanomeria pauciflora var. parishii (Jeps.) Munz
Stephanomeria pauciflora var. pauciflora

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.