Cinnamomum chekiangense

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Cinnamomum chekiangense, photographed by Marco Mussita — fig. b Marco Mussita, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 62164480

Cinnamomum chekiangense, photographed by Eric Knight — fig. c Eric Knight, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 17228061

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 Cinnamomum chekiangense, 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 Southeast	CHS	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Japan	JAP
Korea	KOR
Nansei-shoto	NNS
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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 88 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-1.6 °C	3.7 °C	20.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	27.0 °C	28.6 °C	30.9 °C
Annual rainfall	1,396 mm	1,972 mm	3,351 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	136 mm	216 mm	565 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 88 research-grade observations of Cinnamomum chekiangense 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 Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.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 16 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.

Camphora japonica Raf.
Cinnamomum chenii Nakai
Cinnamomum japonicum Siebold ex Nakai
Cinnamomum japonicum f. pilosum Hatus.
Cinnamomum japonicum f. tenuifolium (Makino) Akasawa
Cinnamomum japonicum var. chenii (Nakai) G.F.Tao
Cinnamomum japonicum var. nervosum (Meisn.) Makino & Nemoto
Cinnamomum japonicum var. tenuifolium (Makino) Makino & Nemoto
Cinnamomum pedunculatum f. variegatum Nakai
Cinnamomum pedunculatum var. lancifolium Hatus.
Cinnamomum pedunculatum var. nervosum Meisn.
Cinnamomum pedunculatum var. tenuifolium Makino
Cinnamomum tenuifolium (Makino) Sugim.
Cinnamomum tenuifolium f. nervosum (Meisn.) H.Hara
Cinnamomum yabunikkei H.Ohba
Cinnamomum yabunikkei f. pilosum (Hatus.) Yonek.

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.