Vernonia baldwiniiTorr.

Western Ironweed

WFO wfo-0000071341 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Vernonia baldwinii, photographed by Annika Lindqvist
fig. a Annika Lindqvist, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-11 / obs. 205665465
Vernonia baldwinii, photographed by saltyhiker
fig. b saltyhiker, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 150346626
Vernonia baldwinii, photographed by Annika Lindqvist
fig. c Annika Lindqvist, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 189163278
Vernonia baldwinii, photographed by Haley Daniels
fig. d Haley Daniels, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 149683042
Vernonia baldwinii, photographed by saltyhiker
fig. e saltyhiker, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 190322588
Vernonia baldwinii, photographed by Nathan May
fig. f Nathan May, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 147115637
Vernonia baldwinii, photographed by Annika Lindqvist
fig. g Annika Lindqvist, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 158837239
Vernonia baldwinii, photographed by henrya
fig. h henrya, CC0 1.0 / obs. 145922732

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 = 484 observations

Peak flowering in Jul, from 484 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 15 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.

  • Cacalia baldwinii (Torr.) Kuntze
  • Cacalia gigantea var. baldwinii Kuntze
  • Vernonia baldwinii f. baldwinii
  • Vernonia baldwinii subsp. baldwinii
  • Vernonia baldwinii var. baldwinii
  • Vernonia baldwinii var. interior (Small) B.G.Schub.
  • Vernonia baldwinii var. parthenioides Rickett
  • Vernonia duggariana Daniels
  • Vernonia flavipapposa Daniels
  • Vernonia interior Small
  • Vernonia interior var. baldwinii (Torr.) Mackenzie & Bush
  • Vernonia interior var. baldwinii (Torr.) Mack. & Bush
  • Vernonia interior var. interior
  • Vernonia parthenioides Daniels
  • Vernonia sphaeroides Nutt.

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.