Amelanchier ovalis (Snowy Mespilus)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Amelanchier ovalis, photographed by Katrin Simon — fig. a Katrin Simon, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-04 / obs. 204428645

Amelanchier ovalis, photographed by Jonathan — fig. b Jonathan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 197895608

Amelanchier ovalis, photographed by Josep Gesti — fig. c Josep Gesti, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 196319659

Amelanchier ovalis, photographed by David Delon — fig. d David Delon, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 195428085

Amelanchier ovalis, photographed by Christian Berg — fig. f Christian Berg, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 194282074

Amelanchier ovalis, photographed by Elias — fig. g Elias, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 190316965

Amelanchier ovalis, photographed by Jason Grant — fig. h Jason Grant, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 189883291

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: The New York Botanical Garden
Accession: 02722403
Filed as: Amelanchier ovalis Medik.
Det. by: not recorded on this sheet
Collected: not recorded
Origin: not recorded
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 29 botanical countries

Native distribution of Amelanchier ovalis, 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
Albania	ALB	EUROPE
Austria	AUT
Baleares	BAL
Belgium	BGM
Bulgaria	BUL
Corse	COR
France	FRA
Germany	GER
Greece	GRC
Hungary	HUN
Italy	ITA
Kriti	KRI
Krym	KRY
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Poland	POL
Portugal	POR
Romania	ROM
Sardegna	SAR
Sicilia	SIC
Spain	SPA
Switzerland	SWI
Türkiye-in-Europe	TUE
East Aegean Is.	EAI	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Iraq	IRQ
North Caucasus	NCS
Transcaucasus	TCS
Türkiye	TUR
Algeria	ALG	AFRICA
Morocco	MOR

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.

Flowering 633 in flower of 883 examined

96%

94%

84%

43%

64%

50%

Proportion of examined Amelanchier ovalis in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	1	2	too few examined
Feb	0	0	too few examined
Mar	27	28	96%	82% to 99%
Apr	290	310	94%	90% to 96%
May	246	292	84%	80% to 88%
Jun	44	102	43%	34% to 53%
Jul	3	58	5%	2% to 14%
Aug	1	34	3%	1% to 15%
Sep	1	17	6%	1% to 27%
Oct	10	23	43%	26% to 63%
Nov	7	11	64%	35% to 85%
Dec	3	6	50%	19% to 81%

Peak flowering in Mar. Each bar is the share of Amelanchier ovalis observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 633 of 883 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 2 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 1,991 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-10.8 °C	-3.4 °C	2.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	18.1 °C	24.3 °C	28.9 °C
Annual rainfall	574 mm	958 mm	1,857 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	72 mm	148 mm	337 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 1,991 research-grade observations of Amelanchier ovalis 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. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 52 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.

Amelanchier amelanchier (L.) H.Karst.
Amelanchier amelanchier var. acutifolia (Rouy & E.G.Camus) Asch. & Graebn.
Amelanchier amelanchier var. dalmatica Asch. & Graebn.
Amelanchier amelanchier var. genuina (Rouy & E.G.Camus) Asch. & Graebn.
Amelanchier amelanchier var. grandifolia (Rouy & E.G.Camus) Asch. & Graebn.
Amelanchier amelanchier var. tomentella (Rouy & E.G.Camus) Asch. & Graebn.
Amelanchier cretica var. typica Halácsy
Amelanchier embergeri (Favarger & Stearn) Landolt
Amelanchier integrifolia Boiss. & Hohen.
Amelanchier orbicularis Borkh. ex Steud.
Amelanchier ovalis subsp. comafredensis (O.Bolòs & Vigo) Romo
Amelanchier ovalis subsp. embergeri Favarger & Stearn
Amelanchier ovalis subsp. vulgaris Rivas Goday & Borja
Amelanchier ovalis subvar. comafredensis O.Bolòs & Vigo
Amelanchier ovalis var. balearica Briq.
Amelanchier ovalis var. djurdjurae Chabert
Amelanchier ovalis var. genuina Briq.
Amelanchier ovalis var. grandifolia Bald.
Amelanchier ovalis var. rhamnoides (Litard.) Briq.
Amelanchier ovalis var. semiserrata C.Presl
Amelanchier ovalis var. willdenoviana M.Roem.
Amelanchier rotundifolia Dum.Cours.
Amelanchier rotundifolia subsp. integrifolia (Boiss. & Hohen.) Browicz
Amelanchier rupestris Bluff & Fingerh.

and 28 more.

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.