Chimaphila japonica

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 7 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 7 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Chimaphila japonica, photographed by Repina Tatyana — fig. a Repina Tatyana, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-07-11 / obs. 142829633

Chimaphila japonica, photographed by ITÔ, Hiroki — fig. b ITÔ, Hiroki, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 140828956

Chimaphila japonica, photographed by 國立臺灣博物館 — fig. e 國立臺灣博物館, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 75351980

Chimaphila japonica, photographed by Cheng-Te Hsu — fig. g Cheng-Te Hsu, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 22119338

Chimaphila japonica, photographed by Cheng-Tao Lin — fig. h Cheng-Tao Lin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 23481089

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 13 botanical countries

Native distribution of Chimaphila japonica, 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 North-Central	CHN	ASIA-TEMPERATE
China South-Central	CHC
China Southeast	CHS
Japan	JAP
Khabarovsk	KHA
Korea	KOR
Kuril Is.	KUR
Manchuria	CHM
Primorye	PRM
Sakhalin	SAK
Taiwan	TAI
Tibet	CHT
East Himalaya	EHM	ASIA-TROPICAL

Not drawn on the map: Kuril Is.. 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 62 in flower of 99 examined

29%

79%

77%

22%

Proportion of examined Chimaphila japonica in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	1	too few examined
Feb	0	0	too few examined
Mar	0	0	too few examined
Apr	0	0	too few examined
May	2	7	29%	8% to 64%
Jun	38	48	79%	66% to 88%
Jul	20	26	77%	58% to 89%
Aug	2	9	22%	6% to 55%
Sep	0	5	0%	0% to 43%
Oct	0	0	too few examined
Nov	0	3	too few examined
Dec	0	0	too few examined

Peak flowering in Jun. Each bar is the share of Chimaphila japonica 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. 62 of 99 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 7 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 198 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-21.9 °C	-6.3 °C	-0.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	14.9 °C	21.9 °C	28.5 °C
Annual rainfall	663 mm	1,540 mm	4,052 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	33 mm	160 mm	453 mm

It is found where winters are severely cold. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 198 research-grade observations of Chimaphila japonica 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 3 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.

Chimaphila astyla Maxim.
Chimaphila fukuyamai Masam.
Pseva japonica (Miq.) Kuntze

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.