Caryopteris incana

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Caryopteris incana, photographed by Yi-fan翊凡 — fig. b Yi-fan翊凡, CC0 1.0 / obs. 188479022

Caryopteris incana, photographed by 葉子 — fig. g 葉子, CC0 1.0 / obs. 178115314

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 5 botanical countries

Native distribution of Caryopteris incana, 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
China South-Central	CHC	ASIA-TEMPERATE
China Southeast	CHS
Japan	JAP
Korea	KOR
Taiwan	TAI

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 109 in flower of 177 examined

75%

60%

53%

50%

27%

42%

71%

88%

92%

67%

Proportion of examined Caryopteris incana in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	15	20	75%	53% to 89%
Feb	6	10	60%	31% to 83%
Mar	8	15	53%	30% to 75%
Apr	3	6	50%	19% to 81%
May	4	15	27%	11% to 52%
Jun	0	16	0%	0% to 19%
Jul	1	1	too few examined
Aug	5	12	42%	19% to 68%
Sep	12	17	71%	47% to 87%
Oct	23	26	88%	71% to 96%
Nov	22	24	92%	74% to 98%
Dec	10	15	67%	42% to 85%

Peak flowering in Nov. Each bar is the share of Caryopteris incana 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. 109 of 177 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. One month has fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for it. 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 373 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-3.3 °C	13.6 °C	17.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	25.4 °C	29.6 °C	32.6 °C
Annual rainfall	1,255 mm	2,441 mm	4,141 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	80 mm	232 mm	660 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 373 research-grade observations of Caryopteris incana 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 20 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.

Barbula sinensis Lour.
Caryopteris incana f. albiflora S.H.Jin & D.Y.Ou
Caryopteris incana f. albiflora S.S.Ying
Caryopteris incana f. candida (C.K.Schneid.) H.Hara
Caryopteris incana f. macrophylla Moldenke
Caryopteris incana f. nana (Borsch) Moldenke
Caryopteris incana f. superba (Dreer) L.H.Bailey
Caryopteris incana f. superba (Dreer) Moldenke
Caryopteris incana var. candida C.K.Schneid.
Caryopteris incana var. nana (Borsch) L.H.Bailey
Caryopteris incana var. szechuanensis Moldenke
Caryopteris mastacanthus Schauer
Caryopteris mastacanthus var. nana Borsch
Caryopteris mastacanthus var. superba Dreer
Caryopteris ovata Miq.
Caryopteris sinensis (Lour.) Dippel
Mastacanthus barbula Steud.
Mastacanthus sinensis (Lour.) Endl. ex Walp.
Nepeta incana Houtt.
Nepeta japonica Willd.

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.