Berberis chilensis

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Berberis chilensis, photographed by Nicolás Lavandero — fig. d Nicolás Lavandero, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 171622255

Berberis chilensis, photographed by Cecilia Briceño — fig. e Cecilia Briceño, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 161747545

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 1 botanical country

Native distribution of Berberis chilensis, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Chile Central	CLC	SOUTHERN AMERICA

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 401 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-1.0 °C	3.7 °C	9.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	17.8 °C	26.3 °C	29.5 °C
Annual rainfall	393 mm	688 mm	1,091 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	4 mm	10 mm	37 mm

It is found where winters bring light 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 401 research-grade observations of Berberis chilensis 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 Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.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.

Berberis brachybodria var. brevispina Reiche
Berberis brachybotria Gay
Berberis chilensis var. diffusa (Gay) Reiche
Berberis chilensis var. ferox (Gay) Reiche
Berberis diffusa Gay
Berberis ferox Gay
Berberis fragrans Phil.
Berberis fragrans Phil. ex Reiche
Berberis gayi K.Koch

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.
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.