Chenopodium giganteum

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Chenopodium giganteum, photographed by Claudia Ramírez — fig. b Claudia Ramírez, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 193704406

Chenopodium giganteum, photographed by Patrick Hacker — fig. c Patrick Hacker, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 161144893

Chenopodium giganteum, photographed by Daniel Cahen — fig. d Daniel Cahen, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 152565236

Chenopodium giganteum, photographed by Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas — fig. e Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 94792934

Chenopodium giganteum, photographed by Erik Rytter — fig. g Erik Rytter, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 46165828

Chenopodium giganteum, photographed by carnifex — fig. h carnifex, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 41484448

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: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Accession: K000898428
Filed as: Chenopodium giganteum D.Don
Det. by: Aellen, P.
Collected: Scheimer
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 7 botanical countries

Native distribution of Chenopodium giganteum, 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
China North-Central	CHN	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Manchuria	CHM
Primorye	PRM
Tibet	CHT
East Himalaya	EHM	ASIA-TROPICAL
Nepal	NEP
West Himalaya	WHM

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 684 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-6.1 °C	2.0 °C	9.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	19.1 °C	23.5 °C	34.8 °C
Annual rainfall	516 mm	790 mm	1,379 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	18 mm	138 mm	239 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 684 research-grade observations of Chenopodium giganteum 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.

Atriplex hortensis var. benghalensis (Lam.) Moq.
Chenopodium album subsp. amaranthicolor H.J.Coste & A.Reyn.
Chenopodium album var. centrorubrum Makino
Chenopodium album var. purpurascens (Jacq.) Kuntze
Chenopodium amaranticolor (H.J.Coste & A.Reyn.) H.J.Coste & A.Reyn.
Chenopodium atriplicis L.f.
Chenopodium bonariense Moq.
Chenopodium centrorubrum (Makino) Nakai
Chenopodium elegantissimum Koidz.
Chenopodium leucospermum Schrad.
Chenopodium mairei H.Lév.
Chenopodium punctulatum Scop.
Chenopodium purpurascens Jacq.
Chenopodium rubricaule Schrad. ex Moq.

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.