Populus balsamiferaL.

balsam poplar

WFO wfo-0000928157 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Populus balsamifera, photographed by Henry "Nick" Robertson
fig. a Henry "Nick" Robertson, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-05-19 / obs. 198995032
Populus balsamifera, photographed by Steven Lamonde
fig. b Steven Lamonde, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 201423627
Populus balsamifera, photographed by jyoung2399
fig. c jyoung2399, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 201390849
Populus balsamifera, photographed by Carol Ann Vermeer
fig. d Carol Ann Vermeer, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204858224
Populus balsamifera, photographed by Suzanne Carriere
fig. e Suzanne Carriere, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 193344255
Populus balsamifera, photographed by Jason Grant
fig. f Jason Grant, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 174091473
Populus balsamifera, photographed by Renato Robert
fig. g Renato Robert, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 161382063
Populus balsamifera, photographed by Mary Krieger
fig. h Mary Krieger, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 163214590

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 = 80 observations

Peak flowering in May, from 80 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 5 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.

  • Aigiros balsamifera (L.) Lunell
  • Populus balsamifera subsp. balsamifera
  • Populus balsamifera var. balsamifera
  • Populus latifolia Moench
  • Populus tacamahacca Mill.

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.