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Trillium kurabayashii
Also called Giant Purple Trillium
Giant purple wakerobin is a perennial woodland wildflower from a rhizome, valued for its very large dark purple-red flower held without a stalk. It is native to a few small areas of southwestern Oregon, northern California and the Sierra Nevada foothills, and is grown in shaded, moist gardens.
Trillium kurabayashii is a species of flowering plant in the bunchflower family Melanthiaceae. The species is endemic to the western United States, occurring in extreme southwestern Oregon, northwestern California, and the Sierra Nevada of northern California. It was first described by John Daniel Freeman in 1975. The specific epithet kurabayashii honors Masataka Kurabayashi, a Japanese cytologist and population geneticist who first postulated the taxon’s existence. It is commonly known as the giant purple wakerobin, a reference to its conspicuously large, dark purple-red flower, one of the largest of any sessile-flowered trillium.
Unlike most other authorities, the influential Jepson Manual does not recognize Trillium kurabayashii as a distinct species.
There are two small disjunct populations of Trillium kurabayashii in the western United States. One population extends along the western slope of the Klamath Mountains from Curry County in extreme southwestern Oregon to Humboldt County in northwestern California. (The type specimen was found at the edge of a logged redwood forest in the town of Klamath in Del Norte County, California.) The other population occurs in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada, in Placer, Nevada, Yuba, and Butte counties in northern California. Outside of its native range, citizen scientists have observed T. kurabayashii in a handful of counties in California and Oregon.
A garden plant known in the nursery trade as Trillium sessile var. rubrum was widely bought and sold in the 1950s and 60s. It had sessile flowers with large, dark red, erect petals over strongly mottled, sessile leaves. The availability of this plant was largely due to the efforts of a man named Gilman Keasey of Corvallis, Oregon who grew the plants from seed in great quantities. By 1968 his annual crop of flowering size plants had reached about 15,000. Keasey collected his original three plants in northwestern California in 1947, suggesting that the species was in fact Trillium kurabayashii, the only species of sessile-flowered trillium now known to occur in that region.
Giant white wakerobin · Narrowpetal wakerobin · Kamchatka Trillium · Bashful wakerobin · Whip-poor-will flower · Trillium channellii · Giant wakerobin · Wenatchee Mountains Trillium · Little sweet Betsy · Chattahoochee River wakerobin · Trailing wakerobin · Mottled wakerobin
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Trillium kurabayashii by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
