Aplectrum hyemale(Muhl. ex Willd.) Torr.

putty root

WFO wfo-0000243897 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Aplectrum hyemale, photographed by John Brown
fig. a John Brown, CC0 1.0 / 2022-05-25 / obs. 200639978
Aplectrum hyemale, photographed by Evan M. Raskin
fig. b Evan M. Raskin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 197595682
Aplectrum hyemale, photographed by Michael J. Papay
fig. c Michael J. Papay, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 196824876
Aplectrum hyemale, photographed by Christopher Zacharias
fig. d Christopher Zacharias, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 201857444
Aplectrum hyemale, photographed by Clay Gibbons
fig. e Clay Gibbons, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 198967943
Aplectrum hyemale, photographed by Katie Kucera
fig. f Katie Kucera, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204119948
Aplectrum hyemale, photographed by Hill Craddock
fig. g Hill Craddock, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 193675369
Aplectrum hyemale, photographed by Mac Post
fig. h Mac Post, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 193161017

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.

Confused withby our own model

These are not lookalikes we guessed at. Each one is a species our identification model genuinely mistook for this plant, and how many times. The error rate is published.

Flowering n = 513 observations

Peak flowering in May, from 513 community-annotated observations worldwide. This is a global aggregate, not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres, and citizen-science records cluster near cities, at weekends, and in spring. Where a species has fewer than 30 annotated records we do not draw this chart at all.

Also published as 9 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.

  • Aplectra elatior Raf.
  • Aplectrum hyemale f. pallidum (House) House
  • Aplectrum hyemale var. pallidum (House) Barnhart
  • Aplectrum shortii Rydb.
  • Aplectrum spicatum Britton, Sterns & Poggenb.
  • Aplectrum spicatum var. pallidum House
  • Corallorhiza hyemalis (Muhl. ex Willd.) Nutt.
  • Cymbidium hyemale Muhl. ex Willd.
  • Epidendrum hyemale (Muhl. ex Willd.) Poir.

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.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice, no toxicity claim and no native range, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.