Cypripedium elegansRchb.f.

Elegant Cypripedium

WFO wfo-0000935328 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 1 observation

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 1 time, 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.

Cypripedium elegans, photographed by Siddarth Machado
fig. a Siddarth Machado, CC BY 4.0 / 2016-05-27 / obs. 61306569
Cypripedium elegans, photographed by Siddarth Machado
fig. b Siddarth Machado, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 61306574
Cypripedium elegans, photographed by Siddarth Machado
fig. c Siddarth Machado, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 61306579
Cypripedium elegans, photographed by Siddarth Machado
fig. d Siddarth Machado, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 61306582
Cypripedium elegans, photographed by Siddarth Machado
fig. e Siddarth Machado, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 61306589
Cypripedium elegans, photographed by Siddarth Machado
fig. f Siddarth Machado, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 61306738
Cypripedium elegans, photographed by Siddarth Machado
fig. g Siddarth Machado, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 61306744
Cypripedium elegans, photographed by Siddarth Machado
fig. h Siddarth Machado, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 61306580

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
K000077965
Filed as
Cypripedium elegans Rchb.f.
Det. by
not recorded on this sheet
Collected
King, G. 1879-08-03
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. We link to the digitised sheet rather than rehosting it, because the holding institutions do not serve their images to third parties reliably and we are not going to show you a picture we cannot actually deliver. 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 sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 5 botanical countries

Regions where Cypripedium elegans is native: China South-Central, Tibet, East Himalaya, Nepal, West Himalaya China South-CentralTibetEast HimalayaNepalWest Himalaya
Native distribution of Cypripedium elegans, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
East Himalaya EHM ASIA-TROPICAL
Nepal NEP
West Himalaya WHM
China South-Central CHC ASIA-TEMPERATE
Tibet CHT

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.

Also published as 1 synonym

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.

  • Coelogyne elegans Rchb.f.

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. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. 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.