Caragana pygmaea

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Caragana pygmaea, photographed by Aleksei Baushev — fig. d Aleksei Baushev, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 158448747

Caragana pygmaea, photographed by Татьяна Фирсова — fig. e Татьяна Фирсова, CC0 1.0 / obs. 141609176

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 8 botanical countries

Native distribution of Caragana pygmaea, 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
Altay	ALT	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Buryatiya	BRY
Irkutsk	IRK
Krasnoyarsk	KRA
Mongolia	MON
Tuva	TVA
West Siberia	WSB
Xinjiang	CHX

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 962 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-28.7 °C	-22.4 °C	-12.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	18.2 °C	23.4 °C	26.7 °C
Annual rainfall	121 mm	332 mm	773 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	5 mm	17 mm	107 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 962 research-grade observations of Caragana pygmaea 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 Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.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.

Aspalathus pygmaeus (L.) Kuntze
Caragana komarovii H.Lév.
Caragana pygmaea f. longifolia Kom.
Caragana pygmaea lus. brevifolia Kom.
Caragana pygmaea lus. latifolia Kom.
Caragana pygmaea subsp. austrotuvinica Bondareva
Caragana pygmaea var. acicularis Kom.
Caragana pygmaea var. angustifolia Kom.
Caragana pygmaea var. ouratensis Kom.
Caragana pygmaea var. parviflora H.C.Fu
Caragana pygmaea var. pygmaea
Caragana pygmaea var. viridissima Kom.
Caragana splendens Schischk. ex Sobol.
Robinia pygmaea L.

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.