Dianthus repensWilld.

boreal carnation

WFO wfo-0000644141 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Dianthus repens, photographed by nina_nesterova
fig. a nina_nesterova, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-07-13 / obs. 144029981
Dianthus repens, photographed by Maria Khoreva
fig. b Maria Khoreva, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 115394158
Dianthus repens, photographed by Alexandra Kaganova
fig. c Alexandra Kaganova, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 100879961
Dianthus repens, photographed by Ilya Filippov
fig. d Ilya Filippov, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 33526433
Dianthus repens, photographed by Matt Bowser
fig. e Matt Bowser, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 12474175
Dianthus repens, photographed by Сергей Крыленко
fig. f Сергей Крыленко, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 58758200
Dianthus repens, photographed by Сергей Крыленко
fig. g Сергей Крыленко, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 58758171
Dianthus repens, photographed by Сергей Крыленко
fig. h Сергей Крыленко, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 58758179

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 18 botanical countries

Regions where Dianthus repens is native: Amur, Buryatiya, Chita, Inner Mongolia, Irkutsk, Kamchatka, Khabarovsk, Korea, Krasnoyarsk, Magadan, Mongolia, Sakhalin, West Siberia, Yakutiya, East European Russia, North European Russia, Alaska, Yukon AmurBuryatiyaChitaInner MongoliaIrkutskKamchatkaKhabarovskKrasnoyarskMagadanMongoliaSakhalinWest SiberiaYakutiyaEast European RussiaNorth European RussiaAlaskaYukon Korea
Native distribution of Dianthus repens, 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
Buryatiya BRY
Chita CTA
Inner Mongolia CHI
Irkutsk IRK
Kamchatka KAM
Khabarovsk KHA
Korea KOR
Krasnoyarsk KRA
Magadan MAG
Mongolia MON
Sakhalin SAK
West Siberia WSB
Yakutiya YAK
East European Russia RUE EUROPE
North European Russia RUN
Alaska ASK NORTHERN AMERICA
Yukon YUK

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 445 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -36.1 °C -29.1 °C -18.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 11.9 °C 15.6 °C 21.1 °C
Annual rainfall 395 mm 898 mm 1,302 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 35 mm 133 mm 212 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 445 research-grade observations of Dianthus repens 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 5 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.

  • Dianthus alpinus subsp. repens (Willd.) Kozhevn.
  • Dianthus alpinus var. repens (Willd.) Regel
  • Dianthus chinensis subsp. repens (Willd.) Vorosch.
  • Dianthus repens var. repens
  • Dianthus repens var. scabripilosus Y.Z.Zhao

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.