Clintonia udensisTrautv. & C.A.Mey.

WFO wfo-0000763751 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Clintonia udensis, photographed by Nina Filippova
fig. a Nina Filippova, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-09-03 / obs. 157729063
Clintonia udensis, photographed by Nina Filippova
fig. b Nina Filippova, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 157698363
Clintonia udensis, photographed by Nina Filippova
fig. c Nina Filippova, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 155672578
Clintonia udensis, photographed by Nina Filippova
fig. d Nina Filippova, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 155673065
Clintonia udensis, photographed by Nina Filippova
fig. e Nina Filippova, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 155691581
Clintonia udensis, photographed by Валерия Ковалева
fig. f Валерия Ковалева, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 200841644
Clintonia udensis, photographed by Eugene Popov
fig. g Eugene Popov, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 92781201
Clintonia udensis, photographed by Thibaud Aronson
fig. h Thibaud Aronson, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 173269524

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 19 botanical countries

Regions where Clintonia udensis is native: Amur, China North-Central, China South-Central, China Southeast, Inner Mongolia, Japan, Khabarovsk, Korea, Kuril Is., Manchuria, Primorye, Sakhalin, Tibet, Yakutiya, Assam, East Himalaya, Myanmar, Nepal, West Himalaya AmurChina North-CentralChina South-CentralChina SoutheastInner MongoliaJapanKhabarovskManchuriaPrimoryeSakhalinTibetYakutiyaAssamEast HimalayaMyanmarNepalWest Himalaya Korea
Native distribution of Clintonia udensis, 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
Primorye PRM
Sakhalin SAK
Tibet CHT
Yakutiya YAK
Assam ASS ASIA-TROPICAL
East Himalaya EHM
Myanmar MYA
Nepal NEP
West Himalaya WHM

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 32 in flower of 84 examined

Peak flowering in Jun. Each bar is the share of Clintonia udensis 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. 32 of 84 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 262 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -28.9 °C -14.6 °C -7.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 14.8 °C 19.2 °C 24.2 °C
Annual rainfall 690 mm 1,167 mm 2,770 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 34 mm 166 mm 373 mm

It is found where winters are arctic. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 262 research-grade observations of Clintonia udensis 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 6 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.

  • Clintonia alpina Kunth
  • Clintonia alpina Kunth ex Baker
  • Clintonia alpina var. udensis (Trautv. & C.A.Mey.) J.F.Macbr.
  • Clintonia udensis subsp. alpina (Kunth ex Baker) Kitam.
  • Hylocharis cyanocarpa Tiling
  • Smilacina alpina Royle

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.