Comptonia peregrina(L.) Coult.

sweetfern

WFO wfo-0000617626 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Comptonia peregrina, photographed by Dan Riley
fig. a Dan Riley, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-09 / obs. 204737638
Comptonia peregrina, photographed by Lynn Harper
fig. b Lynn Harper, CC0 1.0 / obs. 205900045
Comptonia peregrina, photographed by Lynn Harper
fig. c Lynn Harper, CC0 1.0 / obs. 205874652
Comptonia peregrina, photographed by Jack Forrester
fig. d Jack Forrester, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205852447
Comptonia peregrina, photographed by Lynn Harper
fig. e Lynn Harper, CC0 1.0 / obs. 203975809
Comptonia peregrina, photographed by Lynn Harper
fig. f Lynn Harper, CC0 1.0 / obs. 203960855
Comptonia peregrina, photographed by Matt Pelikan
fig. g Matt Pelikan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203934073
Comptonia peregrina, photographed by Larry Jensen
fig. h Larry Jensen, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205545329

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 = 251 observations

Peak flowering in Apr, from 251 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 14 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.

  • Comptonia asplenifolia (L.) L'Hér. ex Aiton
  • Comptonia aspleniifolia Banks
  • Comptonia aspleniifolia (L.) L'Hér.
  • Comptonia ceterach Mirb.
  • Comptonia peregrina var. aspleniifolia (L.) Fernald
  • Comptonia peregrina var. peregrina
  • Comptonia peregrina var. tomentosa A.Chev.
  • Liquidambar asplenifolia (L.) C.F.Ludw.
  • Liquidambar aspleniifolia L.
  • Liquidambar peregrina L.
  • Myrica aspleniifolia L.
  • Myrica aspleniifolia var. tomentosa (A.Chev.) Gleason
  • Myrica comptonia C.DC.
  • Myrica peregrina (L.) Kuntze

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.