Vancouveria planipetala (redwood insideout flower)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Vancouveria planipetala, photographed by Amelia Tauber — fig. a Amelia Tauber, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-18 / obs. 199032031

Vancouveria planipetala, photographed by Karen and Mike — fig. b Karen and Mike, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 196102595

Vancouveria planipetala, photographed by Drew Meyer — fig. c Drew Meyer, CC0 1.0 / obs. 186182619

Vancouveria planipetala, photographed by Alan Rockefeller — fig. d Alan Rockefeller, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 183867420

Vancouveria planipetala, photographed by Keenan Pepper — fig. e Keenan Pepper, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 179871271

Vancouveria planipetala, photographed by joergmlpts — fig. f joergmlpts, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 172698919

Vancouveria planipetala, photographed by Ellen C Lovelidge — fig. g Ellen C Lovelidge, CC0 1.0 / obs. 141349665

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 Vancouveria planipetala, 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
Oregon	ORE

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 44 in flower of 109 examined

63%

86%

75%

13%

Proportion of examined Vancouveria planipetala in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	9	0%	0% to 30%
Feb	0	11	0%	0% to 26%
Mar	0	6	0%	0% to 39%
Apr	5	8	63%	31% to 86%
May	25	29	86%	69% to 95%
Jun	12	16	75%	51% to 90%
Jul	1	8	13%	2% to 47%
Aug	1	2	too few examined
Sep	0	6	0%	0% to 39%
Oct	0	5	0%	0% to 43%
Nov	0	7	0%	0% to 35%
Dec	0	2	too few examined

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Vancouveria planipetala 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. 44 of 109 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 8 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.

Epimedium hexandrum f. planipetalum (Calloni) Himmelb.
Epimedium parviflorum (Greene) Kom.
Epimedium planipetalum (Calloni) Citerne
Vancouveria chrysantha var. parviflora (Greene) Jeps.
Vancouveria concolor Greene
Vancouveria crispa Greene
Vancouveria parviflora Greene
Vancouveria vaseyi Greene

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.