Rosa californicaCham. & Schltdl.

California Wild Rose

WFO wfo-0001014357 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Rosa californica, photographed by George Williams
fig. a George Williams, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-12 / obs. 205617368
Rosa californica, photographed by Cricket Raspet
fig. b Cricket Raspet, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204315955
Rosa californica, photographed by Ken-ichi Ueda
fig. c Ken-ichi Ueda, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205322928
Rosa californica, photographed by Cricket Raspet
fig. d Cricket Raspet, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 200457148
Rosa californica, photographed by Alex
fig. e Alex, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 201671963
Rosa californica, photographed by Alex
fig. f Alex, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 201430731
Rosa californica, photographed by Michael Warner
fig. g Michael Warner, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 197397007
Rosa californica, photographed by Dorothy Johnson
fig. h Dorothy Johnson, CC0 1.0 / obs. 200170602

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 = 3,545 observations

Peak flowering in Jun, from 3,545 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.

  • Rosa aldersonii Greene
  • Rosa breweri Greene
  • Rosa californica f. nana (Bean) Rehder
  • Rosa californica f. plena Rehder
  • Rosa californica subsp. chamissoniana C.A.Mey.
  • Rosa californica unranked florepleno Bean
  • Rosa californica var. chamissoniana Crép.
  • Rosa californica var. glabra Crép.
  • Rosa californica var. glandulosa Crép.
  • Rosa californica var. nana Bean
  • Rosa californica var. petersiana C.A.Mey.
  • Rosa californica var. petersiana Crép.
  • Rosa californica var. pubescens Crép.
  • Rosa spithamea A.Gray

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.