Clinopodium chinense(Benth.) Kuntze

WFO wfo-0000891104 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Clinopodium chinense, photographed by 胡正恆(Jackson Hu)
fig. a 胡正恆(Jackson Hu), CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-14 / obs. 197708384

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
The New York Botanical Garden
Accession
00076679
Filed as
Clinopodium chinense (Benth.) Kuntze
Det. by
T. M. Koyama 2004-01-01
Collected
C. Wright
Origin
JP
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 16 botanical countries

Regions where Clinopodium chinense is native: Amur, China North-Central, China South-Central, China Southeast, Inner Mongolia, Japan, Khabarovsk, Korea, Kuril Is., Manchuria, Nansei-shoto, Primorye, Sakhalin, Taiwan, Myanmar, Vietnam AmurChina North-CentralChina South-CentralChina SoutheastInner MongoliaJapanKhabarovskManchuriaPrimoryeSakhalinTaiwanMyanmarVietnam KoreaNansei-shoto
Native distribution of Clinopodium chinense, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Amur AMU ASIA-TEMPERATE
China North-Central CHN
China South-Central CHC
China Southeast CHS
Inner Mongolia CHI
Japan JAP
Khabarovsk KHA
Korea KOR
Kuril Is. KUR
Manchuria CHM
Nansei-shoto NNS
Primorye PRM
Sakhalin SAK
Taiwan TAI
Myanmar MYA ASIA-TROPICAL
Vietnam VIE

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 105 in flower of 108 examined

Proportion of examined Clinopodium chinense in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 1 1 too few examined
Feb 0 2 too few examined
Mar 1 1 too few examined
Apr 8 8 100% 68% to 100%
May 19 19 100% 83% to 100%
Jun 19 19 100% 83% to 100%
Jul 12 12 100% 76% to 100%
Aug 22 22 100% 85% to 100%
Sep 12 13 92% 67% to 99%
Oct 10 10 100% 72% to 100%
Nov 0 0 too few examined
Dec 1 1 too few examined

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Clinopodium chinense 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. 105 of 108 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 5 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 929 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -14.7 °C 3.5 °C 15.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 16.3 °C 23.3 °C 30.1 °C
Annual rainfall 798 mm 3,673 mm 4,858 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 45 mm 368 mm 855 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 929 research-grade observations of Clinopodium chinense 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 15 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.

  • Calamintha chinensis Benth.
  • Calamintha chinensis var. grandiflora Maxim.
  • Calamintha clinopodium var. chinensis (Benth.) Miq.
  • Calamintha clinopodium var. urticifolia Hance
  • Calamintha coreana H.Lév.
  • Calamintha urticifolia (Hance) Hand.-Mazz.
  • Clinopodium chinense f. albiflorum H.Hara
  • Clinopodium chinense f. setilobum H.Hara
  • Clinopodium chinense var. grandiflorum (Maxim.) H.Hara
  • Clinopodium chinense var. urticifolium (Hance) Koidz.
  • Clinopodium coreanum H.Hara
  • Clinopodium urticifolium (Hance) C.Y.Wu & S.J.Hsuan ex H.W.Li
  • Satureja chinensis (Benth.) Briq.
  • Satureja chinensis var. parviflora Kudô
  • Satureja coreana (H.Lév.) Nakai

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. 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.