Euonymus hamiltonianus (Hamilton's spindletree)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Euonymus hamiltonianus, photographed by Marco Mussita — fig. a Marco Mussita, CC BY 4.0 / 2019-10-01 / obs. 53165135

Euonymus hamiltonianus, photographed by Randy A Nonenmacher — fig. d Randy A Nonenmacher, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 26529771

Euonymus hamiltonianus, photographed by WATANABE Hitoshi 渡辺仁 — fig. e WATANABE Hitoshi 渡辺仁, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 195797393

Euonymus hamiltonianus, photographed by Tyler Smith — fig. f Tyler Smith, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 78530386

Euonymus hamiltonianus, photographed by Zihao Wang — fig. h Zihao Wang, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 39659735

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 16 botanical countries

Native distribution of Euonymus hamiltonianus, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Afghanistan	AFG	ASIA-TEMPERATE
China North-Central	CHN
China South-Central	CHC
China Southeast	CHS
Japan	JAP
Korea	KOR
Kuril Is.	KUR
Sakhalin	SAK
Tibet	CHT
Assam	ASS	ASIA-TROPICAL
East Himalaya	EHM
Myanmar	MYA
Nepal	NEP
Pakistan	PAK
Thailand	THA
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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 116 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-14.5 °C	-7.4 °C	1.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	21.8 °C	27.4 °C	31.0 °C
Annual rainfall	888 mm	1,152 mm	2,522 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	67 mm	193 mm	332 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 116 research-grade observations of Euonymus hamiltonianus 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 39 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.

Euonymus atropurpureus Roxb.
Euonymus darrisii H.Lév.
Euonymus dolichophyllus Koidz.
Euonymus dorsicostatus Nakai
Euonymus europaeus var. hamiltonianus (Wall.) Maxim.
Euonymus hamiltonianus f. hamiltonianus
Euonymus hamiltonianus f. koehneanus (Loes.) Blakelock
Euonymus hamiltonianus f. lanceifolius (Loes.) C.Y.Cheng ex Q.H.Chen
Euonymus hamiltonianus f. lanceifolius (Loes.) C.Y.Cheng
Euonymus hamiltonianus f. lanceolatus Rehder
Euonymus hamiltonianus subsp. sieboldianus (Blume) H.Hara
Euonymus hamiltonianus var. australis Kom.
Euonymus hamiltonianus var. hians (Koehne) Blakelock
Euonymus hamiltonianus var. lanceifolius (Loes.) Blakelock
Euonymus hamiltonianus var. nikoensis (Nakai) Blakelock
Euonymus hamiltonianus var. pubinervius S.Z.Qu & Y.H.He
Euonymus hamiltonianus var. semiexsertus (Koehne) Blakelock
Euonymus hamiltonianus var. sieboldianus (Blume) Kom.
Euonymus hamiltonianus var. yedoensis (Koehne) Blakelock
Euonymus hians Koehne
Euonymus juzepczukii Leonova
Euonymus lanceifolius Loes.
Euonymus majumi Siebold
Euonymus nikoensis Nakai

and 15 more.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.