Stokesia laevis(Hill) Greene

Stokes' aster

WFO wfo-0000021794 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Stokesia laevis, photographed by Samuel A Schmid, PhD, PWS
fig. a Samuel A Schmid, PhD, PWS, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-12 / obs. 205627082
Stokesia laevis, photographed by Lauren McLaurin
fig. b Lauren McLaurin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 148140739
Stokesia laevis, photographed by Lauren McLaurin
fig. c Lauren McLaurin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 144354104
Stokesia laevis, photographed by Lauren McLaurin
fig. d Lauren McLaurin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 140711229
Stokesia laevis, photographed by evangrimes
fig. e evangrimes, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 137201254
Stokesia laevis, photographed by Lauren McLaurin
fig. f Lauren McLaurin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 96031447
Stokesia laevis, photographed by Lauren McLaurin
fig. g Lauren McLaurin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 94499170
Stokesia laevis, photographed by Lauren McLaurin
fig. h Lauren McLaurin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 90929186

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 7 botanical countries

Regions where Stokesia laevis is native: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas AlabamaFloridaGeorgiaLouisianaMississippiSouth CarolinaTexas
Native distribution of Stokesia laevis, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Alabama ALA NORTHERN AMERICA
Florida FLA
Georgia GEO
Louisiana LOU
Mississippi MSI
South Carolina SCA
Texas TEX

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 203 in flower of 215 examined

Peak flowering in Jun. Each bar is the share of Stokesia laevis 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. 203 of 215 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 4 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 4 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.

  • Cartesia centauroides Cass.
  • Carthamus cyaneus Banks ex Steud.
  • Carthamus laevis Hill
  • Stokesia cyanea L'Hér.

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.