Aconitum volubile (twining monkshood)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Aconitum volubile, photographed by Alexander Dubynin — fig. a Alexander Dubynin, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-09-12 / obs. 157082226

Aconitum volubile, photographed by Andrew Bazdyrev — fig. b Andrew Bazdyrev, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 171980017

Aconitum volubile, photographed by Oleg Kosterin — fig. c Oleg Kosterin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 151382128

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.

Native range 15 botanical countries

Native distribution of Aconitum volubile, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Altay	ALT	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Amur	AMU
Inner Mongolia	CHI
Irkutsk	IRK
Japan	JAP
Kazakhstan	KAZ
Khabarovsk	KHA
Korea	KOR
Krasnoyarsk	KRA
Manchuria	CHM
Mongolia	MON
Primorye	PRM
Tuva	TVA
West Siberia	WSB
Yakutiya	YAK

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Where it actually grows measured, from 774 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-25.3 °C	-19.5 °C	-16.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	20.3 °C	23.2 °C	24.8 °C
Annual rainfall	431 mm	557 mm	967 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	32 mm	67 mm	126 mm

It is found where winters are arctic. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 774 research-grade observations of Aconitum volubile that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.

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.

Aconitum amurense Nakai
Aconitum ciliare DC.
Aconitum ciliare var. oligotrichum DC.
Aconitum ciliare var. polytrichum DC.
Aconitum flaccidum Rchb.
Aconitum phragmitincola Komarov ex Vorosch.
Aconitum recognitum Rchb.
Aconitum tortuosum Willd.
Aconitum villosum var. amurense (Nakai) S.H.Li & Y.H.Huang
Aconitum volubile var. hirsutum Regel
Aconitum volubile var. oligotrichum (DC.) Kitag.
Aconitum volubile var. tenuisectum Regel
Aconitum volubile var. tortuosum (Willd.) Regel
Aconitum volubile var. volubile

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.