[1][2][3][4] It is native to western North America from British Columbia to California to the Rocky Mountains, where it grows in moist meadows and stream banks.

Erythranthe moschata was widely grown and sold commercially in Victorian times for its fragrance, and is well known for the story that all cultivated and known wild specimens simultaneously lost their previous strong musk scent around the year 1913.

A variety of suggestions were put forward for a solution to the mystery, such as that the scent of the original cultivated form had been a rare recessive feature, which later disappeared as a result of uncontrolled pollination or the introduction of other genes from the wild population.

[10] David Douglas first described the species and in 1826 near Fort Vancouver collected seed from which the first examples in England were raised; it is notable that he made no reference to a strong musk scent in his field notes.

[12] During the 1920s and 1930s, at the height of botanists' interest in the 'lost scent' phenomenon, there were several reports of strongly-scented moschatus specimens being discovered in the wild, such as in 1931 on Texada Island, British Columbia.