Actinostemma tenerumGriff.

WFO wfo-0000519594 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 4 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 4 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Actinostemma tenerum, photographed by 葉子
fig. a 葉子, CC0 1.0 / 2018-01-16 / obs. 28007118

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.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Accession
K000742925
Filed as
Actinostemma tenerum Griff.
Det. by
Jeffrey, C.
Collected
Griffith, W.
Origin
IN
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 15 botanical countries

Regions where Actinostemma tenerum is native: China North-Central, China South-Central, China Southeast, Korea, Taiwan, Tibet, Assam, Bangladesh, Cambodia, East Himalaya, India, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, West Himalaya China North-CentralChina South-CentralChina SoutheastTaiwanTibetAssamBangladeshCambodiaEast HimalayaIndiaLaosThailandVietnamWest Himalaya Korea
Native distribution of Actinostemma tenerum, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Assam ASS ASIA-TROPICAL
Bangladesh BAN
Cambodia CBD
East Himalaya EHM
India IND
Laos LAO
Thailand THA
Vietnam VIE
West Himalaya WHM
China North-Central CHN ASIA-TEMPERATE
China South-Central CHC
China Southeast CHS
Korea KOR
Taiwan TAI
Tibet CHT

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 203 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -13.7 °C 0.1 °C 14.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 26.6 °C 31.6 °C 33.1 °C
Annual rainfall 521 mm 1,476 mm 3,916 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 10 mm 155 mm 636 mm

It is found where winters bring hard frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 203 research-grade observations of Actinostemma tenerum 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 9 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.

  • Actinostemma lobatum f. longiloba Kom.
  • Actinostemma lobatum f. longilobum Kom.
  • Actinostemma lobatum f. subintegra Kom.
  • Actinostemma lobatum f. subintegrum (Komarov) Kitag.
  • Actinostemma lobatum var. japonicum Maxim.
  • Actinostemma lobatum var. subintegrum Kom.
  • Actinostemma tenerum var. tenerum
  • Actinostemma tenerum var. yunnanense A.M.Lu & Zhi Y.Zhang
  • Karivia longicirrha Miq.

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.
  3. 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.