Diapensia lapponicaL.

pincushion plant

WFO wfo-0000644625 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Diapensia lapponica, photographed by Tyler Smith
fig. a Tyler Smith, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-06-12 / obs. 205546747
Diapensia lapponica, photographed by Samuelle Simard-Provençal
fig. b Samuelle Simard-Provençal, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205586225
Diapensia lapponica, photographed by Ida B D Jacobsen
fig. c Ida B D Jacobsen, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 201854018
Diapensia lapponica, photographed by Jack Byrley
fig. d Jack Byrley, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 191436474
Diapensia lapponica, photographed by Ida B D Jacobsen
fig. e Ida B D Jacobsen, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 186067492
Diapensia lapponica, photographed by Steven Lamonde
fig. f Steven Lamonde, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 164453148
Diapensia lapponica, photographed by Steven Lamonde
fig. g Steven Lamonde, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 164457476
Diapensia lapponica, photographed by Steven Lamonde
fig. h Steven Lamonde, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 164455161

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 Diapensia lapponica is native: Krasnoyarsk, West Siberia, Finland, Great Britain, Iceland, North European Russia, Norway, Sweden, Greenland, Labrador, Maine, Manitoba, New Hampshire, New York, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Nunavut, Québec, Vermont KrasnoyarskWest SiberiaFinlandIcelandNorth European RussiaNorwaySwedenGreenlandLabradorMaineManitobaNew HampshireNew YorkNewfoundlandNova ScotiaNunavutQuébecVermont
Native distribution of Diapensia lapponica, 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
Greenland GNL NORTHERN AMERICA
Labrador LAB
Maine MAI
Manitoba MAN
New Hampshire NWH
New York NWY
Newfoundland NFL
Nova Scotia NSC
Nunavut NUN
Québec QUE
Vermont VER
Finland FIN EUROPE
Great Britain GRB
Iceland ICE
North European Russia RUN
Norway NOR
Sweden SWE
Krasnoyarsk KRA ASIA-TEMPERATE
West Siberia WSB

Not drawn on the map: Great Britain. 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 479 in flower of 733 examined

Peak flowering in Jun. Each bar is the share of Diapensia lapponica 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. 479 of 733 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 2,007 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -24.7 °C -16.9 °C -10.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 11.3 °C 16.5 °C 22.3 °C
Annual rainfall 643 mm 1,890 mm 2,230 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 100 mm 348 mm 435 mm

It is found where winters are severely cold. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 2,007 research-grade observations of Diapensia lapponica 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 3 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.

  • Diapensia japonica J.F.Gmel.
  • Diapensia lapponica var. genuina E.A.Busch
  • Diapensia obtusifolia Salisb.

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.