Boehmeria nivea(L.) Gaudich.

Chinese grass

WFO wfo-1000044974 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Boehmeria nivea, photographed by 潘立傑 LICHIEH_PAN
fig. a 潘立傑 LICHIEH_PAN, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-04-30 / obs. 192094447

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
02808011
Filed as
Boehmeria nivea (L.) Gaudich.
Det. by
D. T. Hoàn 2016-01-01
Collected
D. T. Hoàn 2016-05-17
Origin
VN
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 20 botanical countries

Regions where Boehmeria nivea is native: China North-Central, China South-Central, China Southeast, Hainan, Japan, Kazan-retto, Korea, Taiwan, Andaman Is., Assam, Bangladesh, Cambodia, East Himalaya, Laos, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicobar Is., Thailand, Vietnam, Cook Is. China North-CentralChina South-CentralChina SoutheastHainanJapanTaiwanAssamBangladeshCambodiaEast HimalayaLaosMyanmarNepalThailandVietnam KoreaAndaman Is.Nicobar Is.Cook Is.
Native distribution of Boehmeria nivea, 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
Andaman Is. AND ASIA-TROPICAL
Assam ASS
Bangladesh BAN
Cambodia CBD
East Himalaya EHM
Laos LAO
Myanmar MYA
Nepal NEP
Nicobar Is. NCB
Thailand THA
Vietnam VIE
China North-Central CHN ASIA-TEMPERATE
China South-Central CHC
China Southeast CHS
Hainan CHH
Japan JAP
Kazan-retto KZN
Korea KOR
Taiwan TAI
Cook Is. COO PACIFIC

Not drawn on the map: Kazan-retto. We hold no public-domain boundary for this region, so it is listed rather than guessed at.

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 60 in flower of 127 examined

Proportion of examined Boehmeria nivea in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 4 8 50% 22% to 78%
Feb 1 4 too few examined
Mar 4 9 44% 19% to 73%
Apr 8 18 44% 25% to 66%
May 1 6 17% 3% to 56%
Jun 2 3 too few examined
Jul 2 10 20% 6% to 51%
Aug 5 10 50% 24% to 76%
Sep 11 21 52% 32% to 72%
Oct 9 13 69% 42% to 87%
Nov 4 10 40% 17% to 69%
Dec 9 15 60% 36% to 80%

Peak flowering in Oct. Each bar is the share of Boehmeria nivea 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. 60 of 127 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 1,839 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 2.0 °C 12.4 °C 16.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 27.0 °C 29.5 °C 31.2 °C
Annual rainfall 1,483 mm 2,777 mm 4,196 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 71 mm 190 mm 762 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,839 research-grade observations of Boehmeria nivea 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 38 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.

  • Boehmeria candicans Hassk.
  • Boehmeria compacta Blume
  • Boehmeria frutescens var. concolor (Makino) Nakai
  • Boehmeria frutescens var. viridula (Yamam.) Suzuki
  • Boehmeria juncea Bedevian
  • Boehmeria mollicoma Miq.
  • Boehmeria nipononivea Koidz.
  • Boehmeria nipononivea var. concolor (Makino) Ohwi
  • Boehmeria nivea (L.) Gaudich.
  • Boehmeria nivea f. concolor (Makino) Hatus.
  • Boehmeria nivea f. concolor (Makino) Kitam.
  • Boehmeria nivea f. nipononivea (Koidz.) Kitam.
  • Boehmeria nivea f. nipponivea (Koidz.) Hatus.
  • Boehmeria nivea f. viridula (Yamam.) Hatus.
  • Boehmeria nivea subsp. nipononivea (Koidz.) Kitam.
  • Boehmeria nivea var. candicans (Hassk.) Wedd.
  • Boehmeria nivea var. concolor Makino
  • Boehmeria nivea var. nipononivea (Koidz.) W.T.Wang
  • Boehmeria nivea var. nivea
  • Boehmeria nivea var. reticulata Blume
  • Boehmeria nivea var. tenacissima (Roxb.) Miq.
  • Boehmeria nivea var. viridula (Yamamoto) S.S.Ying
  • Boehmeria nivea var. viridula Yamam.
  • Boehmeria tenacissima Gaudich.

and 14 more.

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. USDA PLANTS Database. common name, checklist symbol BONI2. public domain. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. 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.